Side event 4 at INC 5.2 – Trade at the core of the treaty: Data, investment, services and consumer information

David Vivas Eugui is Chief of Ocean and Circular Economy Unit, a.i., Trade, Environment, Climate Change and Sustainable Development Branch, at UNCTAD.

Previously, he was a Senior Economic Affairs Officer in UNCTAD’s Trade Negotiations and Commercial Diplomacy Branch, Deputy Programmes Director at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), Senior Attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL),  Attaché for Legal Affairs at the Mission of Venezuela to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Staff Attorney at the Venezuelan Institute of Foreign Trade. David is an international expert with more than 20 years of experience on legal and economic issues.

He has worked as an advisor and consultant for various institutions, international and national organizations and has lectured on intellectual property, trade, oceans economy and environmental law at the University of Strasbourg (CEIPI), Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), Maastricht University (the Netherlands), WIPO Distant Learning Academy, and University of Business and International Studies (Switzerland).

He holds a JD from the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, an LLM from Georgetown University and a Master in Transnational Business from the Universidad Externado de Colombia.

Dr. Deere Birkbeck is Director of the Forum on Trade, Environment and the SDGs (TESS), a partnership of the Geneva Graduate Institute and UNEP, where she leads the initiative’s work to foster inclusive international cooperation on trade and sustainability. Her recent research focuses on climate change and trade, where notably she has championed the idea of an inclusive Trade Ministers Coalition on Climate, as well as the global governance of plastics and plastic pollution. She is also an Associate Fellow of Chatham House. Dr. Deere Birkbeck is the founder and Board Chair of Global Policy Reporting, a Geneva-based non-profit organisation dedicated to open access and independent news reporting, which houses Health Policy Watch (launched in 2019) and Intellectual Property Watch for the prior 15 years. She also served as an Assistant Director at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York where she was responsible for grantmaking on intellectual property, trade and sustainable development. Previously, she worked for the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford, the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), and the Overseas Development Council.