New York Graduate Plan Online Professor & Permanent Observer of IUCN to the United Nations
For the past 12 years, David O'Connor has been Chief of Policy and Analysis of the Division for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In that role his team has guided the analytical support to the negotiations for the Rio+20 Conference, the proposal on sustainable development goals of the General Assembly's Open Working Group on SDGs, and the September Summit outcome, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. His team also helped support the work of the Intergovernmental Expert Committee on Sustainable Development Financing, which helped shape the Addis Ababa Action Agenda agreed in July of this year. His former team also produces the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), mandated by the Rio+20 Conference as an important means of strengthening the science-policy interface in international discussions on sustainable development at the United Nations. Before joining the United Nations, Dr. O'Connor worked for 14 years as a researcher at the Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), based in Paris. Soon after the first Rio Conference in 1992, he published a study entitled Managing the Environment with
Rapid Industrialisation: Lessons from the East Asian Experience. He has also served on the Economic Options Panel of the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances. Prior to joining the OECD, Dr. O'Connor worked as consultant to the World Bank and to UNIDO. Dr. O'Connor holds degrees from Yale, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University College London, where he completed his doctorate.
