Dr. H. David Cooper is a Oxford Martin School Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School and Honorary Researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford. He is also Chair of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the public body that advises the UK Government and devolved administrations on UK-wide and international nature conservation.

David is the former Deputy Executive Secretary and Acting Executive Secretary of the of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and worked previously at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, for various NGOs and the UK’s agricultural research service.

David has extensive experience in environmental and agricultural science and policy, and international negotiations. He built strong and productive working relationships with countries in all regions and with partners in civil society, international organisations, and the scientific community. At COP-15, he worked closely with COP President Minister Huang Runqui to facilitate the development and adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

David was a lead author for the Global Biodiversity Outlook, the CBD’s flagship publication, contributed to various assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and was a lead author for the Biodiversity Synthesis of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He has edited four books on agricultural biodiversity and has written numerous papers on biodiversity science and policy. He holds an MA in Agricultural and Forest Sciences and a DPhil in Plant Physiology, both from the University of Oxford.