Dr. Krishna Prasad Oli, born in eastern Nepal’s Tehrathum district, has had an elaborate four-decade-long professional career where he has worked with the Government of Nepal as well as with major international and multilateral institutions in various leading capacities.
Before his recommendation as the waiting-in-next Ambassador of Nepal to the People’s Republic of China, he served as the Chairperson of the Governing Board of Trustees at the National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC), Nepal’s pioneering biodiversity conservation and research institution, having a key role in the country’s protected area management, planning and development.
Among some of his more recent engagements, Dr. Oli served as Advisor to the Former President of Nepal, Ms. Bidya Devi Bhandari, on natural resources, climate change and environment. Here he had a specialized task in building strategic directions for Nepal’s green development potentials, pathways and partnerships.
Prior to this, he was a Member of the National Planning Commission, Nepal’s foremost development-planning authority, where he was part of the team responsible for developing the 15th Five Year Plan of the Government of Nepal. Here Dr. Oli was mainly responsible for strategizing policy-level initiatives relating to the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation, Ministry of Forests and Environment, Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives, and the Ministry of Land Reform and Poverty Reduction. Dr. Oli was also nominated as an Expert Member in the Climate Change Council of the Government of Nepal, and was the National Coordinator for developing the Strategy for Sustainable Development in Nepal.
Some of his important engagements with non-government multilateral institutions, among many others, include, his role as: Focal Point for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at the International Centre for Integrated Development (ICIMOD), National Convener for the World Food Program of the United Nations, and Regional Coordinator under the Environmental Change and Ecosystem Services (ECES) Programme. Dr. Oli’s role in coordinating the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation Initiative to develop regional cooperation framework for Mount Kailash Sacred Himalayan Landscape in China, India and Nepal and five other countries in the region, together with his work in programming and implementing the CBD targets and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), specifically supporting implementation of the Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) mechanism of the Nagoya Protocol, continue to carry lasting significance.
Between 2004 and 2005 Dr. Oli was responsible for drafting the Trans-boundary Biodiversity Landscape Corridor Plan, a plan for linking the protected areas of Nepal with the greater landscape in the eastern Himalayas. Besides this, he has also led special assignments with Asian Development Bank (ADB), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and many other UN-affiliated institutions like UNEP, UNDP, and FAO.
As an academician, Dr. Oli has been an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Social Development and Western China Development Studies in Sichuan University in China from 2015 to 2018. He was also a Visiting Professor at Xizang Minzu University in Shaanxi Province, China. In Nepal, he is a Visiting Professor at the Kathmandu School of Law, and was also a visiting faculty teaching International Environment Law and Policy at Tribhuvan University. Dr. Oli continues to contribute to numerous quality research, thematic and policy-level publications.
Dr. Oli is married with three children to Mrs. Renuka Oli. He speaks Nepali, English and Hindi languages fluently and little Chinese.