17 December 2021

Monique Barbut, President of the World Wildlife Fund France

Monique Barbut joined IFFIm’s Board of Directors in July 2021. Currently the President of the World Wildlife Fund France, Ms Barbut has spent her extensive career in public service, playing a key role in environmental and financial global negotiations at the U.N. She currently serves as special envoy on biodiversity for the French President. Ms Barbut is a French citizen.

What experiences shaped you as a person and influenced your career?

I always wanted to travel. I graduated with an economics degree and started at a private bank ready to do that. But they told me they would never send me abroad. Women could only be sent to “safe” countries, so they couldn’t send me to a “difficult” country. Meaning, if I were sent abroad, the men who were being posted to difficult countries would never have a chance to go to the “nice” countries. That was 35 years ago.

So I turned to the Agence Française de Développement. I was the first woman to be sent outside Paris, to Réunion, a French island next to Madagascar.

One day, they sent me to a meeting about the environment. It was the late 1980s. It was a high-level meeting, and I was a young woman, but they did not think the subject was very important. At that meeting, I was confronted with questions about the environment for the first time. I was fascinated, and I decided to pursue the subject.

At the time, there was no knowledge about the environment in the French aid system. I took the initiative to gain that experience and developed expertise on environmental issues at the international level.

What I say to women who come to me for advice is, “don’t work on the subject that everybody else is focused on.” It is always in the margins, away from where all the political interest is, that you have freedom to imagine new things.

My family has always come first. I have three children. Two are doctors, and one has a PhD in political science. When they were young, it was difficult to juggle everything, but they were my priority. I remember working in the Cabinet of Ministers. I said, “I can do whatever you want, but at 7 p.m. I have to be home.” Knowing my life was not just my job has also structured my mind.

How do you think SDG goals overlap between the environment, health and other sectors?

There is a direct link between COVID-19 and the environment. We are destroying biodiversity in the ecosystem where wild animals live and pushing them out of their natural habitats. In the last 20 years, every single new virus has been linked with wild animal to human transmission: Ebola, AIDS, SARS, the avian flu. And COVID-19 might not be the most dangerous one.

In France, we are working on One Health, a science-based programme to search for new emerging viruses coming from wildlife in the future. Up until now, we have been very lucky, and we have been able to find these, but we are sure there will be more. The question is, what kind of virus, what intensity?

Currently, I am excited about a project called the Great Green Wall of Africa. The programme concerns 11 sub-Saharan countries and aims to restore 100 million hectares of land and bring jobs. We have been able to leverage US$ 16 billion from different donors.

You were director of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and proposed its creation. How would you apply lessons learned from your work at GEF? Do you see similarities with IFFIm?

GEF and IFFIm have influenced each other. IFFIm is an independent institution that links a U.N.-type of institution with the World Bank. GEF was designed on that model—independent in governance and decision-making but built on the financial strength of the World Bank and the capacity to spread out through all U.N. institutions.

IFFIm was created later than GEF and was able to create a lean type of governance and management, avoiding GEF’s institutional heaviness. You don’t need a huge administration to make something powerful, and IFFIm is clearly an example of that. We don’t need more institutions. We have enough of them to answer the world’s needs. The problem we are confronted with is to make sure they do not compete but try to collaborate and keep their roles and expertise separate. Division of labour is important.

You are the first IFFIm board member with experience working at the U.N. How do you envision bringing your experience there to IFFIm?

At the U.N., as soon as a subject is on the table, everyone tends to feel they can be responsible. You dilute your skills when each institution looks at too many subjects at the same time. So, I think it is important for IFFIm to stay on track and do what it does best.

IFFIm should not just be thought of as a finance machine. If you want to look for financing for vaccines, you need to have a good reason for it.

In each part of the world there are different reasons why people want vaccination or don’t. I am very surprised to see riots against vaccines in France. Are we taking it for granted that everyone in developing countries wants to get vaccinated? How can we make sure there is buy-in?

There has never been so much talk about vaccination as there is today. How can we leverage this attention to push for new schemes to vaccinate the world? We should take this time to imagine creative new ways to do business.