Over the last 25 years, Maryam’s career has spanned working as executive, founder & entrepreneur and serving on advisory boards in the industry, government and the United Nations. She has led, drove and managed transformative multi-stakeholder climate change initiatives with global impact to support transitioning to resilient low-carbon economy. In 2020, Maryam was included in a list of ‘Most Influential on Climate Change’ by InsuranceERM and among the top 100 influencers in the world on topic of “Resilience” by The Leaders’ Magazine.
Since 2015, Maryam is the Director of Climate Change and Environment at The Geneva Association, an international think tank, whose members are CEOs of largest insurance companies, globally. Working directly with the C-Suite in the insurance industry, financial institutions, regulatory bodies, multi-lateral organizations and the scientific community, she is leading strategic initiatives to advance forward-looking climate risk assessment and scenario analysis methodologies for both sides of the balance sheet; classification and impacts of climate litigation risk; future proofing of new technologies and processes for disrupting economic sectors and new infrastructure systems for net zero transition; insurability of extreme weather events over long-term horizons and applications of environmental and nature-based systems in risk management.
From 2004 to 2014, Maryam was the Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction Program at the World Meteorological Organization. In 1997 Maryam founded and until 2004 served as the CEO of the Boston-based Climate Risk Solutions, Inc., the first climate risk analytics and advisory firm, which provided services to companies in finance, energy and agriculture sectors and the US government.
Dr. Golnaraghi actively mentors high-tech start-ups in with focus on climate risk modelling and for net-zero transitioning. She has authored numerous internationally referenced reports. Maryam holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University, an MS in Applied Physics and a PhD in Physical Oceanography from Harvard University after which she worked as a senior research fellow at the Harvard Business School.
