Joseph Robertson is Executive Director of Climate Civics International and Chief Strategist for the Climate Value Exchange.

He is a core partner in the Good Food Finance Network and leads GFFN efforts toward a Co-Investment Platform and multidimensional data systems to support resilience-building investment. He serves as GFFN lead for Climate Finance Readiness support to vulnerable countries, in partnership with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

He previously served as Interim Director for the Food System Economics Commission during its start-up phase and then Senior Advisor, Sustainable Finance for the EAT Foundation. He also led the Impact Investors Living Lab for the EU-sponsored Food Trails Initaitive, which produced a Roadmap for Scaling Impact Investment in Urban Food Systems.

At the COP20 round of UN Climate Change negotiations, in Lima, Peru, in 2014, Joseph shared the PARIS Principles—built from insights emerging from a global stakeholder engagement process—in discussions around multidimensional international cooperation to accelerate climate action, without relying on emissions trading. In the Paris Agreement, this kind of cooperative implementation became ‘non-market approaches‘. Ever since, he has engaged in—and helped other engage in—the COP process. Key milestones include:

• working with the COP22 Presidency of Morocco to launch the Resilience Intel initiative in 2017;
• organizing a working dialogue on food systems finance at the COP25 in 2019, which led to the eventual creation of the Good Food Finance Network;
• co-creating the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative, in partnership with The Fletcher School at Tufts University, in early 2022, after COP26 in Glasgow;
• launching the Climate Value Exchange, after the COP28 in Dubai, to support ambitious non-market cooperation.

Joseph’s Resilience Intel work has led to creation of Active Value, focused on developing multidimensional ratings that will provide critical risk and resilience insights to decision-makers.

Joseph is founder of Geoversiv, and a core contributor to the Earth Intelligence podcast—anchored by multiple award-winning Twin Cities broadcast journalist Don Shelby and featuring the internationally recognized sustainability and civic engagement leader Myra Jackson.

From 2014 to 2016, he was a member of the Policy and Strategy Group for the World We Want, which was convened and coordinated by the United Nations Development Programme. As a civil society representative in the PSG, he helped to bring stakeholder insights into the process that shaped the Sustainable Development Goals and suggested pathways for implementation and awareness-raising.

Joseph is author of the 2010 report Building a Green Economy, which found economically efficient carbon pricing would create jobs, raise incomes, and support technological innovation. His translations into Spanish of Earth Policy Institute Eco-Economics and Plan B Updates, from 2000 to 2013, are online at Futurismo Verde.