Imagining a Resilient Future: Keynote Conversation with Island Ambassadors
Event Recap
Join a roundtable featuring Ambassadors to the United Nations representing Antigua and Barbuda, Fiji, Jamaica, and Maldives.
They will give firsthand accounts of how climate change is affecting life on their islands. They will also discuss successes and setbacks in addressing the climate crisis and its impacts on the future they want to build for their communities.
Can island nations be future proofed in the era of climate change? What can the world learn from them? And what should global policymakers do to help? Join us to discuss these urgent questions and more.
Speakers
Thilmeeza Hussain is the Special Envoy of the President of the General Assembly. She is the Permanent Representative of Maldives to the United Nations, concurrent Ambassador of Maldives to the United States, and non-resident High Commissioner to Canada, posts she assumed in 2019. Prior to her appointments, Ambassador Hussain was an Adjunct Professor of Sustainability at Ramapo College in New Jersey teaching at the School of Social Sciences and Human Services. In 2009, she was appointed Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of Maldives to the United Nations, a post she resigned in 2012. During her tenure as the Deputy Permanent Representative, she held the Climate Change and Sustainable Development portfolios. She was a lead negotiator for Maldives at Rio+20 and was also on the UNFCCC negotiation team, co-chaired the Sustainable Development Working Group for the Alliance of Small Island States, and facilitated and coordinated several UN General Assembly resolutions.
Satyendra Prasad is the Permanent Representative of Fiji to the United Nations. From 2016 until his latest appointment, he was the Chief Executive Officer of the Papua New Guinea Governance Facility. Before that, he served as Senior Governance Adviser at the World Bank between 2009 and 2016, Governance Adviser at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development from 2003 to 2009, and Commissioner of Fiji’s Public Service Commission from 1998 until 2000. Between 2001 and 2003, Ambassador Prasad was an associate professor of international management at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan, having previously been a senior lecturer and head of department at the University of South Pacific between 1987 and 2000, and a lecturer in development studies at University College in Cork, Ireland, from 1995 to 1996.
Brian Christopher Manley Wallace is the Permanent Representative of Jamaica to the United Nations. Before his latest appointment, Ambassador Wallace was the Director of S. Manley Wallace & Sons Ltd, a tourism, hospitality, entertainment, real estate, and construction firm in Jamaica, beginning in 2015. He was a legal officer with the company between 1990 and 2005. Between 2013 and 2015, he helped to manage the Office of Administration of Justice in New York, Geneva and Nairobi. From 2010 to 2013, he worked at the United Nations Management Evaluation Unit, conducting more than 400 management evaluations of contested decisions on behalf of the Secretary-General. In addition, he served as a legal adviser to the Senior Trial Attorney and Chief of Prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, from 2007 until 2009. From 1998 to 2002 he was a Senator in Jamaica’s Parliament.
Walton A. Webson is Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda to the United Nations, and Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Ambassador Webson was the lead voice of the initiative for raising pledges in support of global response to the needs of the Caribbean to Hurricanes Irma and Maria. The UN-sponsored activity attracted more than $2.1 billion in pledges.