Kate Brown
A passion for islands and island people are the reasons that Kate Brown loves her job. Kate is from New Zealand (an island country) and spent eight years working on island issues at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme in Apia, Samoa prior to joining IUCN. She also worked in Western Australia on promoting sustainable farming systems in agriculture.
Kate now leads the GLISPA Coordination Unit based in IUCN Washington, D.C. Office. GLISPA is a partnership of which IUCN is a partner, with a steering committee to help with the functioning of the partnership.
The main focus of her work with GLISPA is to raise attention of island issues globally, facilitate the sharing of experiences between island countries and countries with islands, to support island leadership and commitment by facilitating both technical and financial resources to help islands meet their goals and to enable GLISPA members to work together to advance island conservation and sustainable livelihoods.
GLISPA is recognized as one of the mechanisms to advance the Convention on Biological Diversity’s island biodiversity programme of work and was called for by island leaders at the Mauritius international meeting for Small Island Developing States in 2005.