Joseph Robertson is Founder and Executive Director of Earth Civics 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. From June 2026, he serves as a Climate Finance Specialist for the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment (OCB) at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

He previously held the position of Interim Director for the Food System Economics Commission during its start-up phase, later becoming Senior Advisor, Sustainable Finance for the EAT Foundation. He also led the Impact Investors Living Lab for the EU-sponsored Food Trails Initiative, 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 multilateral cooperation to mainstream climate solutions.

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

Joseph is a proud graduate of Villanova University, where he completed Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees and later served as a member of the faculty for nearly 10 years. While on faculty, he co-authored a multidisciplinary sustainability curriculum and hosted a series of Climate Talks roundtables. He also co-led a literary workshop and online magazine in Spanish, with award-winning Chilean poet Carlos Trujillo, and published a prescient essay on the ways in which new information platforms create a “marketplace of illusion”.

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.