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Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL)

For over a decade at CISL, Ana has pioneered work bringing together financial regulators, climate policymakers, local communities, science and industry to apply risk-sharing systems for the Sustainable Development Goals and the Climate Agenda.

Ana is currently leading a multi-disciplinary initiative to place risk-sharing systems at the centre of Loss and Damage using the risk capital markets to multiply the impact of donor funds. The action plan is outlined in CISL’s briefing Risk Sharing for Loss and Damage: Scaling up Protection for the Global South.

She is also collaborating with the insurance regulator of Costa Rica to apply CISL’s Call-to-Action Risk Sharing in the Climate Emergency: Financial Regulation for a Resilient, Net Zero, Just Transition.

Biography

Ana’s initial work at CISL resulted in the publication Insurance Regulation for Sustainable Development (CISL 2015), which provided the first mapping of how insurance could support SDG goals and targets. It was launched at the UN Financing for Development Summit in Addis Ababa to inform policy recommendations for the SDGs. 

She then collaborated for two years with local communities in the Philippines to evaluate the impact of pre-arranged finance on households devastated by Typhoon Haiyan. This was the first publication to assess insurance impacts on the delivery of SDG targets in the years after a major disaster.

Beyond CISL, her work focused on governance, international trade law and food security. Her publications include the books Human Rights and World Trade, Hunger in International Society (Routledge) and International Society and the Middle East, co-authored (Palgrave McMillan).

Ana has advised on trade development in the Middle East with the UNDP; worked for Bloomberg as an editor, producer and news anchor; and led the regulatory section of a public-private partnership on parametric insurance for smallholder farmers. 

Dr Ana  Gonzalez Pelaez
Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership