Keith Alverson is the Executive Director of the World Climate Research Program’s Climate and the Cryosphere Project. He splits his time between the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA and his home in Ottawa, Canada. Keith was formerly the director of the UNEP International Environmental Technology Center in Osaka, Japan from 2016 to 2020, which focused on technological solutions to global waste management and climate change. Prior to that he served for five years as the Director of the Freshwater, Land and Climate Branch at UNEP Headquarters, in Nairobi, Kenya, where he oversaw UNEP’s global portfolio of projects in climate change adaptation and ecosystem-based climate change mitigation as well as terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem management. From 2004-2011, Keith was Head of Ocean Observations and Services at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, based in Paris, France, as well as director of the Global Ocean Observing System. Prior to 2004, he was Executive Director of the IGBP Past Global Changes (PAGES) project in Bern, Switzerland, coordinating global cooperation in paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental research.

Keith has a degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, with a concentration at the Center for Energy and the Environment, along with a certificate in East Asian Studies, from Princeton University (1988) and a doctorate in Physical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1995). His postdoctoral research in modeling past climate variability was in the Physics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. Keith has over 150 publications including Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change (Elsevier, 2018), Global Change and Future Earth (Cambridge, 2018), Past Global Changes and Their Significance for the Future (Elsevier, 2000), Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future (Springer, 2002), Watching over the world’s oceans (Nature, 2005) and Taking the Pulse of the Oceans (Science, 2006). He has served on a number of high level scientific panels including as President of the International Commission for Climate of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, Secretary General of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Commission for Climatic and Environmental Change and Chair of the United Nations Interagency Coordination and Planning Committee for Earth Observations.