Dina Ionesco

Dina Ionesco heads the Migration, Environment and Climate Change (MECC) Division at the UN Migration Agency (IOM). In this capacity, she oversees, since 2015 IOM’s policies and programmes on migration, environment and climate change and leads IOM’s contributions to policy processes, such as the climate change negotiations. Dina represents IOM in the Task Force on Climate Displacement (TFD) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and in the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD). 

Dina has led the efforts towards the establishment of the first ever environmental and climate change migration structure in IOM and of the first institutional environmental sustainability policy and programme. She was awarded the ‘Inspirational woman working to protect the environment’ distinction, as part of the 2016 International Women’s Day, at the initiative of UN Environment, the Geneva Environment Network and the Swiss Confederation. 

Dina has joined IOM in 2004 and has since held different responsibilities advancing IOM’s migration policy, capacity building and research activities. 

Prior to IOM, she worked with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for the Local Entrepreneurship and Employment Development (LEED) Programme on local development, employment, industrial clusters, gender and social capital policies, as well as with European Dialogue an NGOs on human rights, with UK academia and as an independent consultant. 

She is the author of the Atlas of Environmental Migration together with Daria Mokhnacheva and François Gemenne, produced numerous other articles and publications and regularly contributes to media and artistic projects around environmental migration. 

Dina holds a Post-Graduate Diploma in Business Studies from the London School of Economics (UK), a master’s degree in European Studies from Sussex University (UK) and graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (France). 

Dina’s passion for migration stems from her personal experience as a political refugee from Romania to France in the 1980s.