Akpezi Ogbuigwe (Nigeria, Lagos) is the Chair of the Earth Charter International Council. Dr. Akpezi Ogbuigwe is the Founder of Anpez Centre for Environment and Development (ACFED), a centre she founded in 1991 to respond to the huge environmental neglect and pollution of the Niger Delta Region. She is the promoter of The Star Advantage Network founded to mobilise and proliferate change actions to keep HOPE (Help One Person Everyday) alive and lighten up our world in every dimension. She currently serves as UNU-RCE’s Regional Adviser for the region of Africa, where she facilitates cooperation and partnerships for sustainable development from local to global and vice versa.
Dr. Ogbuigwe served as the Head of Environmental Education and Training at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2002 – 2014), the main focal point for UNEP for the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, and the Coordinator of UNEP’s Ecosystem Management Programme. While at UNEP, among other responsibilities, she coordinated UNEP’s multi-stakeholder programme on Mainstreaming Environment and Sustainability in African Universities (MESA) and the student’s movement on Sustainability Generation. Dr. Ogbuigwe was also UNEP’s focal point, trainer, and facilitator for the UNEP/University of Joensuu Course on International Environmental Law Making and Diplomacy, as well as the lead writer of the UNEP Environmental Education and Training Implementation Strategy for 2008 – 2011. Prior to joining UNEP in 2002, she was a Reader and Dean, for five years, at the Faculty of Law, Rivers State University (RSU) where she was appointed Reader in 1999. Between 2010 and 2012, she was appointed a guest professor at the Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
With over thirty years of professional experience as a law professor and avid researcher in transformative change in higher education in Africa, environmental law and policy, and sustainable development and education or sustainable development, she facilitates university partnerships and actively engages in civil society participation and has contributed to various articles published in international journals and book chapters. Her publications include: The Imperative for Legal Education Responsiveness to the Climate Change Exigency, in Faculty of Law RSU 40th Anniversary Publication (2022); SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals: A view from inside Africa’s Higher Education Institutions, in Approaches to SDG 17 Partnerships for the SDGs (SDGs), GUNI, 28-36 (2018); Climate Change Education in Africa, SAJEE, 2009. Access her TEDXFGCU talk on Africa: An Alternate Narrative (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyLgMFMS6QI); and plenary keynote lecture at the 2018 AASHEC Conference at https://youtu.be/1NU-JKLcw0w.
Dr. Ogbuigwe has received awards and distinctions such as the Environmental Creation Awareness Award from Environment Outreach magazine (2010) and the Outstanding Young Persons of Nigeria Award in recognition of contributions to Moral and Environmental Leadership by the Junior Chamber International Nigeria during its 40th Anniversary Convention (1997). She was also honored as the Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor by the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education at Florida Gulf Coast University, United States, in 2011.