Carolyn Deere Birkbeck

Carolyn Deere Birkbeck is the founder and executive director of the Forum on Trade, Environmental Sustainability and the SDGs (TESS), housed at the Geneva Graduate Institute. TESS works to foster inclusive international cooperation and action on trade and sustainability.

Carolyn heads the Secretariat of the Coalition of Trade Ministers on Climate, co-led by Ecuador, the European Union, Kenya and New Zealand, which is housed at TESS. She is also Principal Advisor to the Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade (IFCCT), the Secretariat of which is jointly housed at TESS and the Centre on Global Energy Policy (CGEP) at Columbia University.

She is a senior research associate in the Global Economic Governance Programme at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She was previously assistant director of the global inclusion theme at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York.

She holds an MA (Economics, Energy and Environment) from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a DPhil in International Relations from University College, Oxford.