Livia is a senior climate change practitioner with extensive expertise in adaptation, systems thinking and sustainability. She has experience working in a variety of international and national roles on climate change and sustainable development including with the United Nations and New Zealand Government. She is a member of the Homeward Bound global transformational leadership initiative, for women leading in STEMM.
She has recently returned to New Zealand after working with the UN Climate Change Secretariat and UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs for over a decade, helping to advance the intergovernmental negotiations on climate change and sustainable development. She’s a big fan of taking collaborative and systems thinking approaches to build resilience and enable urgent climate action, including responding to disasters and supporting the most vulnerable.
Livia previously led the UNFCCC Secretariat’s work to get Sustainable Development Goal 13 – Climate Action - up and running, as well as UN system collaboration and interagency activities, with a focus on supporting countries to make the most of synergies to implement the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. She coordinated negotiations on the ‘ambition package’ of items in the lead up to the Paris Agreement, resulting in Articles 2 and 14.
She lives with her young daughter Noa on a 4 hectare block of farmland and regenerating bush in New Zealand, where they are planting 10,000 native trees and creating an eco sanctuary (the Myrtle Eco Trust).
Livia has qualifications in sustainability science and systems analysis (Lund University, Sweden), climate change adaptation (Oxford University, UK) as well as ecology and economics (University of Canterbury, New Zealand).
