Oliver Hillel is Programme Officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biodiversity, an agency of the UN Environment Programme in Montreal, Canada, where he has engaged States, Regions and cities, as well as their global networks, in the work of the Convention for the last 16 years, leading to the adoption of plans of action for subnational and local authorities and to parallel Summits. Since 2018 he is also responsible for the mainstreaming of biodiversity into economic sectors and development for the Convention, working with businesses and their networks and associations, with finance, technology and innovation leaders, and with NGOs and other non-State actors to revert the curve of biodiversity loss through sustainable production and consumption in sectors as diverse as tourism, infrastructure, food, energy, water, mining and extractives, lifestyle and information technology. This includes managing an Ad-Hoc Technical Expert Group on mainstreaming, and collaborating with all relevant corporate or financial entities, UN agencies and actors with dependencies and impacts on nature.

A biologist with a master's in Environmental Education and MBAs on Managerial Accounting and Hotel Management, Oliver has worked for 5 years as team leader for a 17-million USD tourism development cooperation project in the Philippines for JICA, for 5 years as Tourism Programme Coordinator for UN Environment and another 5 as Conservation International’s Ecotourism Program director. He has co-organized and chaired more than 25 large-scale UN meetings including six Summits for city and subnational governments, parallel to meetings of the Conference of the Parties. He also ran a family business on paper recycling, coordinated capacity-building programmes and products on tourism and hospitality for a Brazilian agency related to the Chamber of Commerce of the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for ten years, co-authored several reference publications on tourism, nature and urban issues, and serves on the Board of several projects and research networks.