Kevin Conrad

Kevin Mark Conrad, born in the United States to parents living in Papua New Guinea in 1968, is a Papua New Guinean lawyer and environmentalist. He grew up in the Arapesh tribe near Wewak,East Sepik Province and graduated from Ukarumpa High School in the Eastern Highlands Province.

Conrad serves as Special Envoy and Ambassador for Environment & Climate Change for Papua New Guinea and also the executive director of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. He is a graduate of Columbia University,London Business School, and University of Southern California.

He was the country's Special Envoy and Ambassador to the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban.

Conrad is a leading figure behind global efforts to value the ecosystem services provided by tropical forests with the objective of reducing rates of deforestation and increasing forest conservation. In this context, he is generally credited for launching efforts within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) now widely referred to as REDD+ -- 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries.'

Further, in his role at the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, Conrad has been instrumental in the establishment of the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and the United Nation's UN-REDD Programme. Based upon these efforts, industrialized countries — including Norway, the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, and Australia — pledged around US$3.5 billion by the close of 2009 under the Copenhagen Accord for capacity-building and incentives to reduce rates of deforestation in participating developing countries.

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