Maryam Golnaraghi

Director, Climate Change and Environment, The Geneva Association (GA)

Maryam Golnaraghi has been an executive, senior advisor, head of research, connector, entrepreneur, and climate scientist. She has led, driven, influenced, and managed transformative multi-stakeholder climate risk initiatives in the private and public sectors, with significant global impacts to scale up transitioning to a resilient low-carbon economy.

Her latest initiative is mobilizing the insurance industry to develop innovative risk management solutions for de-risking new viable climate technologies for decarbonization of key sectors (energy, transportation/mobility, construction, heavy industries) to enable large-scale deployment and new infrastructure systems, expedite adoption and attract private capital.

Other key areas of her focus are climate risk analytics, financial and insurance product innovation and new market development for managing climate risks, strategic work with boards of directors/C-suite for integration of climate change and sustainability into core business and shaping regulatory requirements related to the financial and insurance sectors.

Currently, Maryam is the director of climate change and environment at The Geneva Association (GA), a leading international strategy think tank whose members are a group of over 80 CEOs of the largest global insurance companies (life and non-life).

Prior to that, she was the chief of the International Disaster Risk Reduction Program at the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, the UN agency that launched the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the IPCC. Maryam headed up and built this program to assist governments with the development of climate risk management capacities, leveraging technical and operational services of member states in meteorology, hydrology, and climate.

Maryam was also the founder and CEO of Climate Risk Solutions Inc., the first research and advisory firm to deliver advanced climate risk analytics and risk management solutions to companies in the energy, agriculture, insurance, and financial sectors.

In 2020, she was included on the list of 20 ‘Most Influential on Climate Change’ by InsuranceERM and among the top 100 influencers in the world on “Resilience” by The Leaders’ Magazine.

Maryam serves in a number of advisory boards in the public and private sectors in North America and Europe. She also mentors and invests in high-tech start-ups.

Maryam received a PhD in physical oceanography from Harvard University, a master’s in applied physics from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Cornell University. She was also a senior research fellow at Harvard Business School and a principal investigator at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.