Overview
The Chief Technical Advisor – Biodiversity and Resilience provides senior technical and programme support for UNDP’s biodiversity conservation and climate resilience portfolio, particularly GEF-funded projects. The role focuses on accelerating implementation, ensuring technical quality, and addressing capacity and delivery bottlenecks.
Key Responsibilities
- Provide high-level technical leadership and strategic advice to Implementing Partners, UNDP and other Responsible Parties across all biodiversity and resilience projects.
- Provide hands-on advisory on ecosystem management, invasive species control, protected area governance, climate risk integration, ridge to reef approaches, and nature-based solutions.
- Provide technical leadership to PMUs in technical planning, adaptive management, risk mitigation, and quality assurance of project deliverables.
- Ensure integration of cross‑cutting areas (gender equality, social inclusion, human rights due diligence, stakeholder engagement).
- Work closely with PMU teams in executing annual workplans, budgets, procurement, monitoring & evaluation, and reporting.
- Support annual/multiyear planning (AWPs), budget revision, deliverables scheduling, risk management registers, and adaptive management.
- Coordinate with PMUs to prepare quality reports (QPRs, PIRs, APRs) and results oriented knowledge outputs.
- Lead preparation of technical inputs for steering committee meetings, evaluations, and national reporting obligations.
- Strengthen technical and managerial capacities of government implementing partners through mentoring, on-the-job training, and workshops.
- Facilitate cross-project and cross-country knowledge sharing on biodiversity and climate resilience approaches.
- Foster strong working relationships with line ministries, national agencies, donors, civil society, private sector, and community stakeholders.
- Identify partnership and resource mobilization opportunities to scale up or replicate project interventions.
Required Experience
- Minimum of 7 years (with master's degree) or 9 years (with bachelor's degree) of progressively responsible professional experience in biodiversity conservation, ecosystem management, climate resilience, or closely related technical areas.
- Proven experience providing technical advisory and implementation support for the implementation of donor-funded projects, including work planning, budgeting, monitoring and reporting.
- Proven experience supporting or working on a GEF-funded project.
- Experience in the use of computers, office software packages (MS Word Excel, etc), database packages.
Qualifications
- An advanced university degree (master’s degree or equivalent) in Natural or Physical Sciences, Ecology, Natural Resources Management, Environmental Management, Environmental Economics or a related field is required.
- Or, a first-level university degree (Bachelor´s degree) in the areas mentioned above in combination with an additional 2 years of qualifying experience will be given due consideration in lieu of the advanced university degree.
