Takehiro Nakamura has been with UN Environment since 1992. He is currently Head of the UNEP International Environmental Technology Centre, which is UNEP’s global centre on environmentally sound waste management. His expertise covers sustainable management and use of coastal and marine resources and ecosystem services, transboundary river/lake basin management, sustainable development and management of groundwater systems, land-based sources of pollution and environmentally sound solid waste and wastewater management. He was engaged in the development and oversight of the projects funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and other multilateral financing in the areas of international wasters and chemicals and waste.
All these activities and projects have been designed based on the ecosystem approach and aim at nature-based solutions. He has started a process of incorporating the ecosystem approach in the Regional Seas programme (coordinated by UNEP). He has been engaged, among others, in the assessment of land-based sources of marine and freshwater pollution and introduction of environmentally sound technologies and nature-based solutions to address sources of the pollution.
He has Bachelor and Master of Engineering degrees from Kyoto University (1985 and 1987 respectively). In 1991 he gained a Master of Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2007 a Ph.D. in Global Environmental Studies from Kyoto University, with a thesis on the ecosystem approach to river basin management.
