Speakers European Business and Nature Summit

Dr. Anne Larigauderie (France) is the first Executive Secretary of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. She was appointed by the Executive Director of UNEP in February 2014. Anne Larigauderie received her Master’s Degree in plant molecular biology from the University of Toulouse, France, and her PhD in plant ecology, from the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc and CNRS in Montpellier, France. As a plant ecologist, she spent ten years performing experimental and field work at different institutions looking, in particular, at how climate change will affect plant physiology and ecology in various contexts: study of gas exchange in first pilot project performing CO2 enrichment of natural ecosystems in the arctic tundra (San Diego State University, USA), of root competition for nutrients in California grasslands (University of California – Davis, USA), of responses of grass species to various scenarios of elevated CO2 and temperature (Duke University, USA), and of the adaptation of dark respiration of alpine plant species to future elevated temperatures (University of Basel, Switzerland). She is the former Executive Director of DIVERSITAS, the international programme dedicated to biodiversity science, under the auspices of ICSU and UNESCO, which became in January 2015, a component of the new Future Earth programme for global sustainability. In 2010 she was made «Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honnoeur» by the French Government (Ministre de l’Education et de la Recherche).