Lis is an international development and environment professional who proudly joined the UN Environment Programme in August 2016, first in the Freshwater Ecosystems Unit and then from November 2019 as part of the Climate Change Adaptation Unit. Lis is now the Coordinator for the Global Adaptation Network, an initiative that shares key adaptation knowledge and information around the world. In 2019 Lis also served on secondment to the Policy and Programme Division for SDGs coordination across house.
A native of the Great Lakes region of the United States, Lis has been working at the nexus of development and environment since 2002. She holds degrees in International Relations from Northwestern University in her native Chicago area, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and an MBA in organizational culture and resource management from the University of Reading's Henley Business School in England.
Lis brings with her a wide range and understanding of environmental issues from numerous angles and viewpoints. After beginning her career with short stints at UNICEF, Amnesty International and the UN Volunteers Secretariat, from 2004-2008 she served as a Programme Officer and head of external relations at the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), now part of the Future Earth Secretariat, in Bonn, Germany. While there, she coordinated IHDP's international Open Meeting conferences, capacity-building workshops and networks of young human dimensions researchers, in addition to acting as the focal point to key donors and other stakeholders.
From 2009-2016 Lis worked at UN-Water, the UN's inter-agency coordination mechanism on all freshwater related matters. UN Environment and 30 other UN agencies, funds and programmes make up the membership of UN-Water, in addition to a similar number of international organizations outside the UN system. From 2009 – 2014 this work involved serving as the Programme Implementation and Communications Officer at UN-Water’s capacity development programme aimed at implementing the MDGs related to water and sanitation, UNW-DPC.
In 2015 and 2016 Lis served as UN-Water's Programme Officer, based in New York, as the focal point for the input from the UN system on water and sanitation to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in particular Sustainable Development Goal 6. While there, Lis served in UN-DESA’s Division for Sustainable Development, branch for energy, water and capacity-building, and in this capacity provided water-related inputs to the office of the Secretary-General and Office of the Deputy Secretary-General.
After the ambitious and holistic 2030 Agenda was put into place, Lis shifted her efforts to add coherence and “wo”manpower to the implementation side, in particular SDG 6 for water and sanitation. In the four years since she joined UNEP, Lis has been hard at work linking freshwater topics across the house, including to issues such as coasts, oceans, security, forests and other SDGs. This includes the creation of UNEP’s Freshwater Strategy 2017-2021, firmly focused on UNEP’s water-related mandated in the SDGs, taking a lead role in the 2018 World Water Day campaign on Nature-based Solutions for Water, acting as lead author for the 2018 World Water Development Report and SDG 6 Synthesis Report for the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), and leading on water-related issues at UNEA 3 and UNEA 4.
Having recently joined the Climate Change Adaptation Unit, Lis is excited to pull together different experiences gained over her career to focus on a topic that cuts across and touches upon so many different issues across UNEP. Part of that work is the important effort to pull out and share learnings from UNEP’s impressive project portfolio and add to its normative and upscaling efforts, both internally and externally, while linking to other partners.
In Lis's words: "After witnessing the sidetracking of environment in development issues over the first 15 years of my career, it is thrilling to see ecological issues now assume their proper role as a cornerstone of sustainable development. I'm really looking forward to tackling this new opportunity and challenge for UNEP."
