Kilaparti Ramakrishna

Dr. Kilaparti Ramakrishna is the Senior Advisor to the President on Ocean and Climate Policy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He also teaches in the WHOI/MIT Joint Doctoral Program. Prior to this he served for three years with the Green Climate Fund as its Head of Strategic Planning. With the UN, he has years of experience in different capacities: as Principal Policy Advisor to the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi; as the Head of the UN Secretariat’s office for East and Northeast Asia; and as the UN’s Designated Official in South Korea. He was also head of the Secretariat for the North-East Asian Subregional Program for Environmental Cooperation (NEASPEC).

Dr. Ramakrishna helped draft the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While working in South Korea, he led the design and coordination of the report on “Regional Perspectives on Sustainable Development: Advancing the Integration of its Three Dimensions through Regional Action.” More recently, he co-authored the GCF’s publication on “Scaling Up Climate Finance in the Context of COVID-19.”

An elected life member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Ramakrishna serves also on the board of directors of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, as the Chair of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project and a member of the advisory board of Back to Blue, a global initiative of Economist Impact. He holds B.Sc. and B.L degrees in sciences and law from Andhra University and M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees in international law from Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Law School and taught at a number of law schools including Boston College, Boston University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Harvard Law School, Brandeis, and Yale.