Pavan Sukhdev is the founder & chair of GIST Advisory, a consulting firm specializing in valuing & managing environmental impacts and dependencies at all levels - national, provincial, business and personal. This firm was set up by Pavan’s NGO, GIST (Green Indian States Trust) to fund its research into major economic externalities arising from natural capital and human capital.

Until recently, Pavan was Special Adviser and Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative, which demonstrates that the greening of economies is not a burden on growth but rather a new engine for growing wealth and decent employment, and for the reduction of persistent poverty.

 A career banker, Pavan took a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank from 2008 till 2010 in order to deliver the environmental projects “TEEB” and the “Green Economy Report” for UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative. Pavan was appointed Study Leader of TEEB in early 2008 by the EU Commission and Germany (the first funders of TEEB) whilst still working full time at Deutsche Bank. TEEB, a global study on “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity” commissioned by the G8+5, released a widely-acclaimed suite of reports at the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity bi-annual meeting (CBD COP-10) at Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010.  

Until July 2008, Pavan headed Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets businesses in India, including its Fixed Income and Equities divisions and Global Markets Centre, Mumbai (“GMC, Mumbai”). GMC Mumbai, a company he set up in February 2006, is a dedicated global hub for global markets “front-office” off-shoring. It was a market first of its kind, and is a leader in front-office offshoring of capital markets trading and sales business. From 2006 to 2008, he led the build-out of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets presence in India into a veritable powerhouse, spanning capital markets origination, trading and sales, a fixed income primary dealership, a market-leading equities institutional brokerage, a new Non-banking Finance Company, and GMC Mumbai. 

Pavan pursues long-standing interests in environmental economics and in nature conservation through his work with the Green Indian States Trust (GIST) and other NGO’s. Under his leadership, GIST researched, developed and published methodology & empirical work on preparing comprehensive ‘Green Accounts’ for India and its States, a first among developing nations. Pavan is Chairperson of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Agenda Council” on Biodiversity, and a speaker at Davos. He serves on the boards of Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Conservation International (CI) and on UNDP’s Advisory Panel on the Human Development Report and its Human Development Index (HDI). He has been awarded the McKluskey Fellowship, 2011, by Yale University.

Pavan Sukhdev's blog: http://pavansukhdev.com/