Speaker Bios

COP 17 - Durban, South Africa

Robert D. van den Berg, Director, GEF Evaluation Office

Rob studied contemporary history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Prior to assuming the Director post of GEF Evaluation Office in 2004, he worked for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 24 years in various positions within development cooperation and other policy domains. From 1999 until 2004 he was Director of the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In that position he actively promoted international joint evaluations and strengthening of evaluation capacity in partner countries. From 2002 to 2004 he was the chairman of the OECD/DAC Network on Development Evaluation. He chaired the Steering Committee of the joint international evaluation of external support to basic education, which published its final report in 2003.

Rob has also served as the Executive Secretary of the Netherlands' National Advisory Council for Development Co-operation, and as the Head of the special program for research of Dutch development cooperation. From 1995 to the end of 1997 he was responsible for development cooperation in the Dutch embassy in Suriname. In Brussels he advised the European Commission on setting up a policy for supporting research in partner countries.

Rob has co-edited three books on development cooperation and has published more than 20 articles on various aspects of policy formulation, evaluation, research and development cooperation, and the historical dimension of development, among other subjects. He has given numerous lectures and presentations and is a member of faculty of the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET) since 2000.

Thomas Heller, Executive Director, Climate Policy Initiative

Since CPI’s start in September 2009, Thomas C. Heller has served as CPI's Executive Director. Before joining CPI, Heller was a professor at Stanford University for thirty years, serving as the Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. An expert in law, economic development, and the performance of legal institutions, Professor Heller has focused his research on the rule of law, international climate control, global energy use, and the interaction of government and nongovernmental organizations in establishing legal structures in the developing world.

Since 1991, Heller has been increasingly engaged in research and applied policy studies in energy and climate, with a principal concern regarding developments in China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and other leading emerging markets. He was a contributing lead author for the IPCC on the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports, as well as a contributor to the Special Reports on Technology Transfer and Emissions Scenarios.

In 2008, Heller became a core team member directing Project Catalyst - an analysis-based project in support of the Copenhagen Climate process. Since March 2010, Professor Heller has also acted as the Vice-Chair of the Governing Board of the Global Green Growth Institute, with headquarters in Seoul, Korea. Professor Heller has a B.A. from Princeton University and an L.L.B. from Yale Law School.

Bonizella Biagini, Head Climate Change Adaptation Strategy and Operations, GEF Secretariat, LDCF/SCCF

A physicist by training, Dr. Bonizella (Boni) Biagini has worked on climate change mitigation and adaptation over the last 20 years in Europe, United States and in cooperation with developing country partners worldwide.  She has also extensive experience climate change negotiations having participated in all fifteen COPs, from Berlin in 1995 to the upcoming Durban in 2011.

Boni Biagini is the Head of Climate Change Operational Strategy and Operation unit at the Global Environment Facility who helped shaping the first adaptation programs that financed some of the first concrete adaptation investments at the World Bank and the UN agencies in partnership with the GEF. She is currently responsible for the GEF Adaptation program and portfolio of the GEF and manages the Least Developed Country Fund (LDCF) and the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF). She is managing a $650 million project portfolio aimed at financing adaptation in vulnerable countries.

Before joining the GEF, Boni Biagini worked at the World Resources Institute in the Climate, Energy and Pollution Program as leader of several international projects on adaptation to climate change and sustainable development. Boni Biagini previously directed the international office of Legambiente, a leading Italian environmental research organization, and has taught courses on environmental science and politics at the University of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). 

She was recently selected to be part of the group of scientists who will shape the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, and is a contributor and reviewer of the IPCC Third and Fourth Assessments Report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and the author of numerous publications on climate change science and politics, including the report Confronting Climate Change, Economic Priorities and Climate Protection in Developing Nations.

Ken Chomitz, Sr. Advisor, World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG)

Kenneth Chomitz is a Senior Advisor in the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, where he is leading a series of evaluations of the Bank’s climate change activities, and advises more generally on assessing development effectiveness. Previously he was a Lead Economist with the Bank’s Development Research Group.

Chomitz’s work has focused on global environmental issues.  Climate Change and the World Bank Group: The Challenge of Low Carbon Development, an evaluation he directed, assesses the effectiveness of the Bank Group in promoting greenhouse gas mitigation.  His book, At Loggerheads? Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction and Environment in the Tropical Forests, was called “far and away the best available treatment of the globally critical issue of tropical forest conservation” by Conservation Biology.  He was a coauthor of the Bank’s World Development Report 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World.  Chomitz was a pioneer in the econometric modeling of deforestation using remote sensing data.  He has published articles on economic issues related to deforestation, biodiversity, and climate change, and has also worked on issues related to health, population, and labor.

Chomitz holds a degree in mathematics from MIT and a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Irvine.  Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences; Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University; and Senior Advisor with the Development Studies Project, a policy research institute associated with the Indonesian National Development Planning Board.