Guest Blog: Erik Solheim: what he got right, what he got wrong, and what the new UN Environment chief should do next
Guest Blog by: Oli Brown Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources Department, Chatham House. The original is published here . Make no mistake, when Erik Solheim resigned as head of UN Environment on 20th November 2018, less than two and a half years into what most likely would have been an eight-year tenure, the timing was not of his choosing. The proximate reason for his defenestration was a damning report by the UN’s internal auditors, known as the Office for Internal Oversight Services. The report excoriated his travel expenses, which amounted to nearly $500,000 spent on business-class flights and hotels over the course of 22 months. It also detailed a variety of other eye-catching issues, such as spending nearly 80% of his time out of the organisation’s Kenyan headquarters and relaxing HR rules for favoured staff members. It is vanishingly rare for Under-Secretary-Generals (USG) in the UN system to be forced...