Lars-Erik Liljelund – Mistra’s new CEO
At an extra meeting today, June 17th 2010, Mistra’s Board of Directors elected to appoint Lars-Erik Liljelund as Mistra’s new CEO. Liljelund comes most recently from the position of Director General responsible for Climate issues and Strategy for the Baltic, in the Swedish Prime Minister’s Office.
Lars-Erik Liljelund will assume his new duties at Mistra on August 16th.”I am really looking forward to taking the helm at Mistra. It is going to be tremendously interesting to get to know all of the programmes, which cover a broad territory in the area of strategic environmental research,” says Liljelund, who is already the Executive Committee Chair for the Mistra research programme Clipore.
For the past two years Lars-Erik Liljelund has been Climate Advisor to the Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt. Previously, between 1999 and 2008, he was the Director General of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency.
”The Board is very happy to have successfully recruited a so knowledgeable and competent CEO for Mistra, who has extensive experience with environmental issues from both the political and research communities,” says Lena Treschow Torell, Chair of Mistra’s Board of Directors.
Lars-Erik Liljelund is 63 years old and completed is doctorate in Ecological Botany at Stockholm University in 1977. From 1994 through 1998 he worked at the Ministry of Environment as Director of the Swedish government’s Environmental Advisory Council.
Between 1993 and 1997, Liljelund was Vice Chair and Chair of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), first under the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and later under the Arctic Council. He was Board chair for the European Union’s Environmental Agency between 2003 and 2008. He has been a member of the Chinese government’s environmental advisory body – the China Council – as well as a Board member for the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOR) since 2007.
