Members of the Working Group
Convenor - UNCDF
Abhisheik Dhawan
Sustainable Finance & Partnerships Specialist
UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF)
Abhisheik Dhawan is currently working as Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist with UNCDF. In this role, he is responsible for creating innovative blended finance vehicles as well as lead partnerships efforts for UNCDF at a corporate level. As part of his efforts on creating innovative blended finance vehicles, he has led the creation of Climate Insurance Linked Resilient Infrastructure Finance (CILRIF) multi-stakeholder working group over the last 36 months. Prior to joining UNCDF, he worked as Director, Cleantech Practice at Business Development Bank of Canada.
With 20+ years of experience in international markets and financial services, he has worked with banks and technology companies, including start-ups, in India and the United States, engaging with clients across continents. Over the last eight years, he has shifted focus to sustainable development. Abhisheik started on his banking career of over a decade with IDBI Bank at Bangalore, India’s tech capital, with a focus on the IT industry. Subsequently, he worked as Director at Standard Chartered Bank covering middle market and large corporate clients.
Abhisheik has completed an MPA with a concentration on Economic and Energy Policy and Finance from Columbia University in New York. He also holds an MBA in Finance from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM Kozhikode), CFA-Level II and a B.Tech. in Mining Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (ISM- Dhanbad).
Insurance & Reinsurance Companies
Suzanne Bourgault
Climate Change Adaptation Business Developer
Axa Climate
Suzanne Bourgault works as a public sector business developer at AXA Climate, the AXA Group’s centre of expertise for parametric insurance and climate risks. She started her career in the resilience and energy transition sector with a focus on renewable energy projects management.
Suzanne holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science with a focus on Economics from Sciences Po Paris and a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics and Political Science where she completed her master thesis on parametric sovereign risk pools.
Karina Whalley
Head of Public Sector Business Development
Axa Climate
Karina Whalley is leading public sector business development at AXA Climate, the AXA Group’s centre of expertise for parametric insurance. Based in Paris, she also supports the AXA Group chairman Denis Duverne in his role as chair of the Insurance Development Forum.
Karina was previously working as technical underwriter at the African Risk Capacity, a sovereign natural catastrophe risk pool that provides parametric cover for African governments.
Karina holds a master’s degree in geopolitics from the Université libre de Bruxelles, with a focus on development economics in Africa. She also holds an undergraduate degree in pure mathematics and finance from the University of Cape Town.
Andrew MacFarlane
Chief Actuary
Axa XL (P&C & Specialty Risk)
Andrew MacFarlane is Head of Pricing & Analytics for London & Bermuda for Reinsurance at AXA XL and a Partner on AXA XL’s Leadership Council. In his Head of Pricing & Analytics role he manages the actuarial team across London and Bermuda supporting underwriters across a broad range of business lines and products.
Andrew plays an instrumental role in looking to expand AXA XL’s involvement in closing the protection gap and leads the Public Sector Partnership practice group at AXA XL. The aim of the group is to strengthen partnerships with the public sector in order to bring socially impactful insurance solutions to the market.
He holds an Honors degree in Actuarial Science and Statistics from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
Michael Roth
Public Sector Business Practice Lead
Munich Re
Experience: Master in Economics, 2 years of experience in corporate finance, 8 years of experience in international development cooperation working on financial system development with focus on Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently leading Munich Re Public Sector Practice in the Alternative Risk Transfer and Capital Markets Division of Munich Re.
Areas of Expertise: Financing and Insurance know-how, consulting and development know-how, understanding of the public sector objectives, motivations and challenges, being capable to align private sector business interests and public sector interests.
Investors
Stephen Liberatore, CFA
Managing Director, Lead Portfolio Manager, & Head of ESG
Nuveen
Steve is the lead portfolio manager for Nuveen’s fixed income strategies that incorporate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria and Impact investments, including those that comprise Nuveen's Core Impact Bond, Short Duration Impact Bond and Green Bond composites. He is a member of the Investment Committee, which establishes investment policy for all global fixed income products.
Steve graduated with a B.S. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an M.B.A. in Finance and Operations from Wake Forest University’s Babcock Graduate School of Management. He holds the CFA designation and is a member of the CFA Society of North Carolina and the CFA Institute.
Philippe Trahan
Director, ILS Group
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan
Philippe Trahan has been heading the ILS group since he joined OTPP in Toronto in 2007. In this role, he is responsible for originating and managing a portfolio of ILS assets across a wide variety of financial instruments, life and non-life perils and geographies. Philippe has also been extensively involved in various climate change efforts at OTPP and is a strong advocate for better measurement of physical climate change risks in (re)insurance and ILS markets.
Prior to joining OTPP, Philippe was a reinsurance broker with Aon Re for 5 years and also held various non-traditional actuarial positions. Philippe is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Actuarial Sciences from Laval University in Quebec City.
Experts
Lisa Churchill
Founder
Climate Advisory LLC
Lisa Churchill is a climate change expert, with a focus on the intersect of the built and natural environments. She has extensive experience leading climate resilience initiatives with public and private sector clients, including the World Bank, Washington DC, confidential REITs, developers and tech companies.
Lisa recently launched Climate Advisory llc to help solve for large-scale investment needs in resilience. The business creates a platform connecting major investors to a robust project pipeline of climate adaptation needs. Projects include both infrastructure and nature-based solutions.
Lisa has a Bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology from Colby College, Maine and a Master’s degree in Geological Sciences from University of Michigan.
Alexander Jaeger
Green/Sustainable Finance Project Director
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Alexander is part of the competence centre Financial Systems Development and Insurance, focusing on advising and developing the global insurance project portfolio of GIZ. Prior to his current position, he was heading a PPP project between GIZ and Swiss Re on climate risk insurance with a focus on Africa, South-East-Asia and China. Before Alexander joined GIZ, he was working for a leading asset manager for microfinance funds and an international auditing and consulting company in the field of insurance.
Michael McCord
Principal & Managing Director
Milliman
Michael is one of the world’s leading experts in developing and managing microinsurance products. His decades of experience include working as controller of a U.S. commercial bank, chief executive officer of a microfinance institution in Uganda, and regional director for microfinance programs in Africa with FINCA International.
Michael specializes in institutional development for microinsurance, development of new products, and analysis of microinsurance programs, having worked for clients in 70+ countries. In addition to his consulting and advocacy work, Michael has written extensively on microinsurance, including numerous microinsurance case studies, reports, and manuals, and has provided microinsurance training to thousands of people across the globe.
Nancy Watkins
Principal
Milliman
Nancy is a Principal with Milliman - San Francisco who manages an actuarial consulting practice that specializes in Insurtech, climate resilience and catastrophic property risk. At the forefront of innovation in the flood space, Nancy and her team provide state-of-the-art tools, technology, and analysis to insurers, reinsurers, producers and industry groups. Widely known as a thought leader in the areas of climate resilience, property insurance availability and affordability, Nancy advises regulators and policymakers on changing catastrophic risk.
Nancy is the primary contact on Milliman’s engagement on NFIP Risk Rating 2.0 and provides strategic advice and support to FEMA. She was awarded the American Academy of Actuaries Outstanding Volunteerism Award for her participation on the Flood Insurance Work Group.
Sam Nandi
Principal
Milliman
Sam leads the actuarial team within Milliman’s Financial Risk Management practice in Chicago. He has played a major role in the development of Milliman’s MG- Hedge® platform and its implementation for many leading life insurers and reinsurers, both within the United States and globally. His work encompasses market risk management for variable annuity guarantees and options embedded within index annuity products. He developed Milliman’s Economic Scenario Generator, which produces stochastic scenarios of interest rates, equity returns, and exchange rates across economies.
Sam is an industry leader in the management of market risk within insurance products. While he has specialized in developing risk management solutions for insurance products and guarantees, he also has extensive experience in financial reporting as well as in mergers and acquisitions.
Shalini Vajjhala
Founder & CEO
re:focus partners
Shalini Vajjhala is the Founder & CEO of re:focus partners, a design firm dedicated to developing resilient infrastructure solutions and innovative public-private partnerships for vulnerable communities around the world. Prior to founding re:focus, Shalini served as Special Representative in the Office of Administrator Lisa Jackson at the US EPA, where she led the US-Brazil Joint Initiative on Urban Sustainability ahead of the Rio+20 Summit.
Shalini has her Ph.D. in Engineering & Public Policy and B. Arch. in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. From 2013-2014 she was a visiting associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and she is currently a nonresident senior fellow with The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.
Jamie Rhodes
Director, Insurance-Linked Finance
re:focus partners
Jamie Rhodes is the Director of Insurance-Linked Finance at re:focus partners, where he co-led the development of a new insurance mechanism known as a Resilience Bond. He is an expert in climate and risk mitigation strategies that fall at the intersection of policy, technology, and project development. Jamie’s work spans nearly 20 years and includes roles in academia, in the private sector, and as a grantee on projects designed to advance the public interest.
He is a technology entrepreneur who holds multiple patents and has founded and built multiple successful enterprises in the climate and energy sectors.
Jamie earned a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, and worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and then as a Staff Researcher at U.C. Davis.
Kamleshan Pillay
Adaptation Finance Manager
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group
Kamleshan Pillay is Adaptation Finance Manager within the Financing Sustainable Cities Initiative team at C40 Cities. He is responsible for managing delivery of adaptation finance support to cities and brings extensive experience in climate and adaptation finance.
Prior to joining C40, he was a technical leader for an International Development Research Centre innovation project, which aimed to develop a climate insurance facility addressing flood risk in South Africa. He also did project coordination for South Africa's BIOFIN project funded by the United Nations Development Programme.
Snigdha Garg
Senior Manager, Adaptation Research
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group
Snigdha Garg is a seasoned sustainability professional with 10 years of experience of working with over 100 cities globally. She has experience in urban resilience, climate change adaptation, cities (local governments), monitoring and reporting, vulnerability assessments, and climate hazards. She has a B.Sc Honors in Botany from Delhi University, India, an M.Sc in Environmental Studies from TERI School of Advanced Studies and MEM from Yale University. She has worked for ICLEI – Local Government for Sustainability and other key industries before joining C40. Together with her team she is currently working on a project investigating adaptation and resilience initiatives by hazard type.
Development Agencies/DFIs
Ola Sahlen
Senior Programme Specialist
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
Ola Sahlén, Senior programme specialist at Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency), has a background from Stockholm School of Economics. During his 30+ years at Sida the first half was devoted to Blended Finance and concessionary credits within infrastructure, mainly to China and other Asian countries. The 2nd half has been devoted to Financial Inclusion in a broad sense. During the mid-00's he, among other things, participated in the start-up of the Microinsurance Network.
Dane McQueen
Senior Advisor, Development & Humanitarian Affairs
UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Dane McQueen is the senior advisor on development and humanitarian affairs at the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, based in its mission to the United Nations in New York. His role includes management of contributions and partnerships with UN agencies, as well renewable energy funds in the Caribbean and Pacific. Prior to New York, he served as the ministry’s energy advisor in Abu Dhabi and helped to launch the UAE’s renewable energy development assistance programme, as well as support national climate and energy policies. He studied at Cambridge, Berkeley, and Yale.
Ellen Brookes
Executive,Climate Change Team
CDC Group
Ellen Brookes has a BA (hons) in Zoology from the Cambridge University, England and an MSc with distinction in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London. She started her career at GlaxoSmithKline in various key roles before moving to CDC as one of the founding members of CDC’s climate change team. She has worked both on the formation of CDC’s new climate change strategy and implementation with a specific focus on Adaptation and Resilience.
Emma Hawkins
Investment Manager,Catalyst Strategies Team
CDC Group
Emma Hawkins has a First Class degree in PPE, Philosophy, Politics, Economics from University of Durham England. Before joining CDC she worked for five years in structured credit at VTB Capital. She joined CDC in April 2015 as an Investment Associate and currently holds the position of an Investment Manager in CDC’s Catalyst Strategies team. CDC invests through its Catalyst portfolio to shape nascent markets and build more inclusive and sustainable economies, and takes a flexible approach to risk in exchange for pioneering impact. Emma served as Director of Corporate Finance for PEG Africa during 2019 and 2020.
Kevin M. Nelson
Urban Team Lead
United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
Kevin Nelson leads the Urban Team within USAID’s Land and Urban Office, a team devoted to incorporating solutions to urban issues in projects around the Agency. In this role, he chairs the Urban Expert Working Group, composed of Agency technical experts who focus on urban work. He also coordinates donor engagement and leads efforts to support the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mr. Nelson represents USAID as a member of Cities Alliance, a global partner in addressing key issues impacting cities due to rapid urbanization.
NGOs
Shilpa Patel
Director of Mission Investing
ClimateWorks
Shilpa Patel comes to ClimateWorks Foundation with a development banking, project finance, and climate policy background. Prior to joining ClimateWorks, she was an independent consultant for a number of organizations on climate finance and was Principal Advisor to the Finance Center at the World Resources Institute. She headed the International Finance Corporation’s work on climate strategy and metrics. She has also managed IFC’s investments in petrochemicals, as well as health and education, and run an experimental incubator for environmental business.
Shilpa holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught courses on Project Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Engineers
H. Kit Miyamoto
President & CEO
Miyamoto International
Dr. Miyamoto is a world-leading expert in disaster resiliency, response and reconstruction. He provides expert engineering and policy consultation to the World Bank, USAID, UN agencies, governments and private sector. He is a California Seismic Safety Commissioner, a Global CEO of Miyamoto International and a structural engineer. From the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake to the Ecuador, Nepal, Indonesia, New Zealand, Mexico and 2020 Puerto Rico earthquakes, Dr. Miyamoto has led teams of experts on dozens of response and reconstruction projects around the world. He is one of the most respected minds in disaster resilience and recovery.
Olivia Nielsen
Associate Principal
Miyamoto International
Olivia focuses is an Associate Principal at Miyamoto International where she focuses on developing innovative policy and financial mechanisms to improve cities. From post-disaster Haiti to Papua New Guinea, she has developed and worked on critical urban programs in over 30 countries. Olivia has a decade of experience in housing finance, public-private partnerships, post-disaster reconstruction and green construction. Through her work she hopes to make cities safe and affordable for all.
Academia
Daniel Osgood,PhD
Lead Scientist, Financial Instruments Sector Team
Columbia University
Daniel Osgood leads the Financial Instruments Sector Team at IRI, linking climate information to financial tools to improve livelihoods in developing countries. His team supports most of the index insurance projects that have gone to scale, with hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers purchasing index insurance contracts they have helped design through farmer-driven, science-based processes, leading to significant development impacts.
He has been involved in global policy processes such as the UNFCCC, with projects he works on highlighted by Ban Ki-moon in the opening speech at the 2015 Paris COP. He has had press coverage in venues spanning Voice of America, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, Nature, New York Times, and Reuters.
Jane Baldwin, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Columbia University
Dr. Baldwin completed her PhD in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University, collaborating with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. She also researched temporal structure and risk of heat waves with Prof. Michael Oppenheimer through a PEI-STEP fellowship. She is currently a Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University working on understanding and quantifying tropical cyclone risk with Prof. Suzana Camargo and Prof. Adam Sobel. Prior to this position, she spent one year as a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), examining mortality risks of heat waves, and controls on tropical cyclone genesis in the East Pacific.
Adam Sobel,PhD
Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
Columbia University
Adam Sobel is a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Engineering School. He studies the dynamics of climate and weather, particularly in the tropics. In recent years he has become particularly focused on understanding the risks to society from extreme weather events and climate change. He directs the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. In recent years Sobel has received awards from the American Meteorological Society, the AXA Research Fund, and the American Geophysical Union. He is author or co-author of over 175 peer-reviewed scientific articles; a book, Storm Surge, about Hurricane Sandy; and numerous op-eds and articles in the mainstream media. He currently hosts a podcast, Deep Convection, featuring wide-ranging conversations with other climate scientists.
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