Masa Nagai
Masa (Masaharu) Nagai is an independent expert in the field of international environmental law and governance, and the former Deputy Director of the Division of Environmental Law and Conventions (Law Division), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
From 1988 to 2016, he served as a United Nations official and a staff member of UNEP, posted at the UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. During those years with UNEP, he had been continuously engaged in the development of international environmental law and institutions, as well as multilateral diplomacy and policy-making processes concerning global environmental issues.
Serving as a leading legal expert of the UNEP secretariat, he provided substantive support to the intergovernmental negotiations of the following instruments:
- Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade;
- Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants;
- Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety;
- Minamata Convention on Mercury;
- Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer;
- Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
In addition, he had been active in supporting developing countries to build their capacities to strengthen and enforce environmental law.
Overall, he spearheaded the development, review and implementation of environmental law under the UNEP Montevideo Programme for the Development and Periodic Review of Environmental Law. In that context, he was active also in addressing the relationships between the environment and other fields, in such areas as military activities and human rights.
Moreover, he played an instrumental role in supporting intergovernmental processes to strengthen international environmental governance, convened under the auspices of the Governing Council of UNEP. Also, from 1999 to 2006, he had been substantively engaged in the organization of sessions of the Governing Council of UNEP, and thereafter continued to take the lead in the UNEP secretariat to handle legal and institutional matters of the Governing Council, which was renamed in 2013 the UN Environment Assembly of UNEP.
After he left UNEP, he has continued research on governance of the global environment, and provided advisory services to the selected international bodies as a consultant or pro bono service.
At present, he serves as a Counsellor and Advisor for the Iriomote Foundation, Okinawa, Japan. He is also a member of the World Commission on Environmental Law of the International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN). He teaches “global environmental governance ” at Sophia University Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies in Tokyo, Japan, as a lecturer.
Masa was born in Chiba, Japan and grew up in the Tokyo metropolitan area. He holds a master’s degree (MA) from Waseda University Graduate School of Political Science, Tokyo, Japan. Currently, he is based in Tokyo, Japan.
Masa Nagai may be reached by email at:
contact (at) masa-nagai.com
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