COP29 Trade and Investment House event: Working together for better climate action

Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO). She is an economist and international development expert with over 30 years of experience.

She was Chair of the Board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (2016 – 2020), the African Risk Capacity (2014 – 2020) and Co-Chair of The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. Previously, she served as Senior Advisor at Lazard and sat on the Boards of Standard Chartered PLC and Twitter Inc.

Dr Okonjo-Iweala was appointed as an AU COVID-19 Special Envoy and WHO COVID-19 Special Envoy. Dr Okonjo-Iweala served twice as Nigeria’s Finance Minister (2003-2006, 2011-2015), the first woman to hold the position, and spent a 25-year career at the World Bank rising to the No.2 position of Managing Director.

In 2020 Dr Okonjo-Iweala was named Forbes African of the Year. She has been ranked by Fortune as one of the 50 Greatest World Leaders (2015) and by Forbes as one of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women in the World consecutively for four years. She holds a Bachelor’s in Economics from Harvard University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chantal Line Carpentier joined UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD)'s Division on International Trade and Commodities (DITC) in 2014, after serving as Chief, UNCTAD New York Office of the Secretary-General. She brings to the Branch over 25 years of work experience in international trade, and environmental and agro-economics.

Prior to working with UNCTAD, she supported the Commission on Sustainable Development and served as Major Groups (of non-State actors) coordinator for the UN Rio+20 Conference and the SDGs negotiations at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). She also supported the sustainable consumption and production and sustainable agriculture negotiations.

As Head of the North American Free Trade Agreement Commission for Environmental Cooperations, she lead work on the nexus of environment, economy, and trade. She also served as Agro-environmental Policy Analyst for Winrock International, and post-Doctoral fellow/Brazil office manager for the International Food Policy Research Institute.

She has an extensive list of publications on sustainable agriculture, trade and environment, sustainable consumption and production, financing for sustainable development, stakeholder engagement, global value chains, micro, small and medium enterprises, and economic empowerment of women.

She obtained a PhD. in Agro-Environmental Economics from Virginia Technology and MSc. and BSc. from McGill University.

Ralph Ossa, Chief Economist and Director Economic Research and Statistics Division, WTO Ralph Ossa is Chief Economist and Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

He joined the WTO in January 2023 after a distinguished career in academia with appointments at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Zurich. Professor Ossa's research focuses on international economics with a particular emphasis on questions of policy relevance. For example, he has explored the economics of trade wars and trade talks and estimated how much countries gain from international trade.

He holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. 

Dora Benedek is a Deputy Division Chief at the Tax policy division of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the IMF. She joined the Fund in 2011 where she has been engaged in Technical assistance and tax policy related analytical work, as well as country work on Bosnia and Herzegovina and Belarus.

Prior to her Fund career she worked in the public administration in Hungary, first at the Ministry of Finance, followed by the Office of the Fiscal Council where she was leading the work of the tax policy analysis team. Her analytical work focuses on tax policy, labor market issues, inequality and microsimulation.

She has a PhD in public finance from the Central European University.

Stéphane Hallegatte is a Senior Climate Change Adviser at the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 2012 after 10 years of academic research in environmental economics and climate science for Météo-France, the Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement, and Stanford University. His research interests include the economics of natural disasters and risk management, climate change adaptation, urban policy and economics, climate change mitigation, and green growth.

He was the team leader for the World Bank Group Climate Change Action Plan, a large internal coordination exercise to determine and explain how the Group will support countries in their implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Mr. Hallegatte holds engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and the Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie (Toulouse), a master's degree in meteorology and climatology from the Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse) and a Ph.D in economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).

Kurt Van Dender is the Acting Head of the Tax Policy and Statistics Division of the Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (CTPA) at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Kurt joined the OECD in 2013, where he now leads a team of economists, lawyers and statisticians focused on delivering high quality economic analysis and tax policy advice and providing internationally comparable tax data and statistical analysis. In prior roles Kurt led the Tax and the Environment work at the CTPA, was the Chief Economist of the International Transport Forum, and was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Irvine.

He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Leuven in Belgium.