Principal and Senior Advisor,
UNDP
Simon Zadek is Senior Advisor to UNDP’s Administrator, and is Principal of Project Catalyst, a UNDP platform advancing large-scale, system-level initiatives to realise the SDGs. He has specific responsibility for the UN Secretary General’s Task Force on Digital Financing of the SDGs on behalf of its co-Chair, UNDP’s Administrator. He has recently been Senior Advisor on Sustainable Finance to the UN Deputy Secretary General, and before that was co-Director of UN Environment’s Inquiry into Design Options for a Sustainable Financial System. For the G20, first under China’s Presidency and then for Germany and Argentina, he led the Green/Sustainable Finance Study Group secretariat, and before that represented UN Environment as the co-Chair of China’s Green Finance Task Force alongside the People’s Bank of China. Simon is widely published and has held many academic positions, including at Tshinghua School of Economics and Management, Harvard’s JK Kennedy School of Government, Singapore Management University and the University of Southern Africa. He has advised many companies on their approach to sustainable development, and has founded and led a number of think tanks and partnerships, including AccountAbility and the Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance.