Claudio Chiarolla

Claudio holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London where he specialized in international and comparative intellectual property law. He has nurtured his expertise in a multicultural setting over two decades of professional experience in the fields of international law and development, environmental law, biodiversity governance, the law of the sea, legal technical assistance, intellectual property, technology transfer, access to genetic resources and benefit sharing, and the regulation of emerging technologies.

Under the framework of the CGIAR Genebank Initiative, as part of the Genetic Resources Policy Group, Claudio currently supports and facilitates CGIAR engagement in international negotiations for the development of new norms related to genetic resources and digital sequence information.

He also works to promote compliance of scientists across CGIAR with national and international access and benefit sharing legislation. Furthermore, he coordinates projects in various African countries (e.g. Togo and Zimbabwe) supporting partners in national agricultural research systems to develop measures to implement, and operate under, the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

In his spare time, Claudio contributes, as a co-lead, to the LSE Oceans Biodiversity Collective, a Policy Research Group on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) that is supported by the LSE Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund 2023-25 (with Dr Siva Thambisetty and Dr Paul Oldham).

Previously, Claudio served, inter alia, as Programme Management Officer responsible for technical and scientific cooperation and technology transfer at the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, as well as in various other capacities at the CARICOM Secretariat, UNDP, WIPO and FAO.