Liz Willetts

Liz Willetts, Team Leader, Editor, and Writer, Earth Negotiations Bulletin, is a science-policy expert on global governance of the health-environment nexus. She has over 20 years’ experience working with governmental and non-governmental organizations, international institutions, think tanks, and UN agencies, and in public health implementation. She specializes in planetary health and One Health and currently consults as a strategic advisor for a portfolio of institutions.

Liz served as Planetary Health Policy Director at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health (2023-2024), as science-policy advisor on biodiversity and health to the Convention on Biodiversity (2023-2024) and on climate change to the WHO (2022), for whom she authored several global policy briefs and a public health Review of IPCC Evidence 2022. She leads the work on Nature and Mental Health for the IUCN CEM Human Health Thematic Group and is an Instructor at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) Futures Institute and Masters’ on Planetary Health. In 2024, she was nominated and accepted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (USA).

Since 2009, Liz has tracked a range of multilateral environmental agreements and processes with the ENB. She is experienced in the governance of climate change, biodiversity, chemicals and waste pollution, food security, water, disaster risk reduction, and sustainable development. She also closely follows the evolving environmental agenda of the WHO.

She has degrees in biology (ecology and human physiology), environmental economics and policy (ecosystem services), and medicine (family/community). As a clinician, Liz served long-term roles for 7 years in resource-poor, primary care medical clinics on a remote island in Micronesia, at a bilingual Spanish clinic in Harvard–Mass General-Brigham hospital system, and in an Indigenous hospital in Central America.

Liz was lead author of four IISD publications:

• COVID-19 and Planetary Health (2020): a 50-year retrospective on the health-environment intersection since the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in the Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN Sustainable Development Policy; 
• Health in the Global Environmental Agenda: a policy guide, an analyses of 9 multilateral environmental agreements plus the World Health Assembly (2021) that led to a Comment in The Lancet;
• Operationalizing the Environment-Health Nexus in Asia and the Pacific, a regional policy guide in collaboration with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2022); and
• Integrating Policy: Water, Endocrine Disruptors, Pharmaceuticals in collaboration with UNEP and the SAICM Secretariat towards the fifth Meeting of the International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM5).