Shrivastava, a US citizen, was born in India and works in Canada and France.  He will take up his post in early February 2015, based at the Montreal Global Hub of the Future Earth Secretariat. He will lead a globally distributed secretariat composed of five global hubs functioning as a single entity, located in Montreal, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Boulder, Colorado. The global hubs will be complemented by a set of regional hubs for the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

The Prime Minister of Quebec, Philippe Couillard, will hold a press conference later today in Montreal (9:30 am EST) to announce Shrivastava’s appointment. Gordon McBean, President of the International Council for Science, and co-chair of the Science & Technology Alliance for Global Sustainability, will be present.

Shrivastava will work with Frans Berkhout, Interim Director of Future Earth, to ensure a smooth handover of functions from the Interim Secretariat based at ICSU in Paris to the new globally-distributed Executive Secretariat. Reporting to the Governing Council of Future Earth, the Executive Director will work closely with an Executive Team formed of the five Global Hub Directors, as well as the Chairs of the Science and Engagement Committees. Recruitment of the hub directors is currently underway.

Flavia Schlegel, co-chair of the Alliance and Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO, said, “We are very pleased to announce the appointment of Shrivastava, whose unique background and skillset at the intersection of academia, business and management makes him the perfect choice to achieve the step-change in ambition that Future Earth requires.”

“I am honoured by this appointment to lead the Future Earth Executive Secretariat.  Future Earth is an organisation of thousands of volunteer scientists working in hundreds of locations around the world.  The secretariat will strive to be the glue that holds the organisation together, by facilitating and coordinating its activities, communicating with stakeholders, enabling research, building capacity, and synthesising foresights.  I look forward to joining the Future Earth team of professionals and highest calibre scientists to develop co-designed and stakeholder engaged sustainability sciences,” Shrivastava said.

Shrivastava received his PhD in Strategic Planning and Policy from the University of Pittsburgh.  He was tenured Associate Professor of Management at NYU Stern School of Business, Howard I. Scott Professor of Management at Bucknell University, and helped establish the International Research Chair in Art and Sustainable Enterprise at ICN Business School in Nancy, France. He was part of the management team that launched one of India’s largest computer companies, Hindustan Computers Ltd, and founded a non-profit organisation to mediate the crisis between Union Carbide Corporation and the Indian government during the Bhopal crisis in the 1980s. He has published 18 books and over 100 papers in academic and professional journals.

Source: ICSU news