SEI Currents 2024

What risks and opportunities lie ahead? Which issues deserve our focus? In January 2024, SEI experts presented key insights affecting the transition of communities, societies, technologies, the private sector, public policymaking and international relations.

SEI Currents 2024 leveraged expertise from SEI centres across five continents, presenting trends that will shape 2024 and beyond. These insights were discussed by a distinguished panel of experts during the event.

Speakers

• Kersti Kaljulaid, former President of Estonia and SEI board member
• Måns Nilsson, Executive Director of SEI
• Robert Watt, SEI Engagement Director

Expert panel

Moderator: Chloé Farand, freelance climate and environment journalist

• Cheikh Mbow, Professor and Director General of the Centre de Suivi Ecologique-CSE
• Eileen O’Connor, Senior Vice President for Communications, Policy and Advocacy at the Rockefeller Foundation
• Pedro Vormittag, Deputy Director of External Relations and G20 expert, Cebri
• Ineza Umuhoza, Co-founder and Global Coordinator of the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition and CEO and Founder of The Green Protector

Keynote speaker

Kersti Kaljulaid served as the President of Estonia from 2016 to 2021. Before her presidency, she was a Member of the European Court of Auditors, and held various high-level positions in the energy, investment banking, and telecom sectors. In 2021, the UN appointed Kaljulaid as Global Advocate for its Every Woman Every Child strategy. She is also a strong advocate for evidence-based policymaking.

Moderated by

Chloé Farand is a freelance climate and environment journalist. Her work has recently appeared in The Guardian, Devex, Semafor, Context News and China Dialogue among others. Until December 2022, she was a senior reporter at Climate Home News where she closely covered UN climate negotiations and international climate politics. She currently edits Climate Home News’ ‘Clean Energy Frontier’ series, which tells global stories on the clean energy supply chain and is due to launch in mid-January.  She is dual national French and British and lives in Oxford, in the UK.

Meet our panel

Cheikh Mbow

Cheikh Mbow is a research Professor and the Director General of the Centre de Suivi Ecologique-CSE (Senegal). He was previously Director of Future Africa at the University of Pretoria.  He served as the Executive Director of START-International in Washington DC and Lead Scientist on Climate Change at the World Agroforestry center in Kenya. He is Adjunct Professor at Michigan State University’s Department of Forestry. He works on Global Change research capacities for developing countries in Africa and Asia. With more than 150 publications on various sustainability issues, Mbow has proven transdisciplinary expertise on food security and sustainable production in Africa

His work focuses on natural resources management, capacity building and translation of scientific information to decision makers and various stakeholder groups. He is a Lead Author on the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) chapter in the IPCC’s AR-5 and AR-6. Mbow has been a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Special Report on Food Security. He served in many Scientific Committees such as the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program-IGBP (2012-2014) and Future Earth (2013-2015). He contributed to many high-level science-policy documents for UN agencies.

Eileen O’Connor

Eileen O’Connor is the senior vice president for Communications, Policy, and Advocacy at The Rockefeller Foundation. She is a member of the Foundation’s executive team, overseeing all government relations and strategic communications for all program priorities, including the climate strategy.

Before joining the foundation, O’Connor spent her career as an attorney and award-winning journalist, serving as vice president of Yale University, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration, for South and Central Asia, and White House and foreign correspondent for CNN and ABC news.  As an attorney, O’Connor specialized in complex litigation, political investigations, multi-party dispute negotiations, and crisis management in the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine.

O’Connor has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University, and a post-graduate Diploma in world politics, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. O’Connor is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the advisory board to the Ad Council, and consults for the Department of Homeland Security on incident response. She often comments on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, and Russian TV, as well contributes comment to the New York Times and CNN.com.

Pedro Vormittag

Deputy Director for External Relations at CEBRI, with a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a Master in International Management degree from the São Paulo School of Business from Fundação Getulio Vargas, in Brazil. Trained as a Lawyer at the University of São Paulo, Pedro taught introductory courses on Sustainable Development, International Law and International Trade at the São Paulo School of Commerce (FAC-SP).

Pedro has worked at the São Paulo City Hall, both as a Deputy Youth Policy Coordinator at the Secretariat of Human Rights and Citizenship and as the Policy Advisor Coordinator and Head of Department at the Secretariat of Sports and Leisure.

Under the leadership of former President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former UN Under-Secretary General Rubens Ricupero, Pedro worked as a Head of Research and Content with the LEGADO Project.

Ineza Umuhoza

Ineza Umuhoza is an eco-feminist and impact-driven actor in the climate change/environment sector based in Rwanda and a researcher in the field of climate change with a focus on climate justice and its policy. She believes in the power of sharing community voices and concerts to achieve climate justice.

She is the co-founder of the “Loss and Damage Youth Coalition” a coalition of more than 900 youth from +70 countries advocating and taking concrete action to address loss and damage; she is its global coordinator. She is the founder of “The Green Protector” a Rwandan NGO aiming to increase active youth participation in protecting the environment through climate action, climate education and engagement in climate policy; the organization reached more than 3,000 children and youth, implementing 10+ activities and host 10+ youth engaged in climate policy negotiation on the international level.

She has been on the Rwanda negotiation team since 2018 following loss and damage. She is a Global Citizen Winner 2023, An Obama Leader 2022, and a Nat-Geo 2020, to name a few.