Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon announced the appointment of Alicia Bárcena Ibarra of Mexico as Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). She will replace current Executive Secretary José Luis Machinea as of July 1.

The Secretary-General expressed his gratitude for Machinea's dedicated service to ECLAC, where his intellectual leadership and deep knowledge of the region contributed greatly to the Commission's relevance and achievement of its goals. The Secretary-General is also grateful for Bárcena's committed services to the UN; she has energetically led the push for management reform, spearheading several initiatives to make the Secretariat more efficient, responsive and accountable.

Bárcena served as the Chief de Cabinet to former Secretary-General Kofi Annan before serving as the Under Secretary General for Management.

Earlier in her career, Bárcena served as Deputy Executive Secretary of ECLAC and in this capacity she contributed substantively and increased interagency collaboration to provide a regional perspective on the Millennium Development Goals and on Financing for Sustainable Development, connecting issues of inequality, poverty, economic development, sustainability with the required fiscal policies needed to address extreme poverty.

As Chief of the Environment and Human Settlements Division of ECLAC, she heightened the profile of the regional commission in the areas of climate change, sustainable energy, fiscal policies and environment. She previously served as Coordinator of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as well as Adviser to the Latin American and Caribbean Sustainable Development Programme in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

She was part of the Secretariat that was in charge of preparing the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. She was Principal Officer in charge of various topics related to Agenda 21 and was also the Founding Director of the Earth Council in Costa Rica.

Previously she served in the Government of Mexico as the first Vice-Minister of Ecology and as Director-General of the National Institute of Fisheries.

In the academic arena, Bárcena was the Director of the South-East Regional Centre of the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones sobre Recursos Bióticos in the State of Yucatán, working closely with the Mayan communities. She has taught and researched on natural sciences mostly on botany, ethnobotany and ecology. She has published a number of articles on sustainable development, namely on financing, public policies, environment and public participation.

Bárcena holds a Bachelor of Science in biology from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a master's degree in public administration from Harvard University. Ms. Bárcena Ibarra was born in 1952.