Mandy Driver

Mandy is an independent specialist working in the fields of biodiversity and Natural Capital Accounting. She worked for two decades in South Africa’s biodiversity sector, most of that time with the South African National Biodiversity Institute, where she helped to establish the South African National Ecosystem Classification System, was centrally involved in the national Red List of Ecosystems, and was instrumental in establishing a programme of work on ecosystem accounting in partnership with Statistics South Africa.

Mandy was closely involved in the development of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) Ecosystem Accounting, adopted as a global standard by the UN Statistical Commission in 2021, and plays an active role in the global and African communities of practice for NCA. She chairs the UN Technical Committee on SEEA Ecosystem Accounting, convened by the UN Statistics Division, which maintains the statistical standard and supports its implementation in a range of policy contexts from local to global. This includes the development of the SEEA-based headline indicators for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Mandy brings an inter-disciplinary perspective to her work, having studied formally in economics, geography and business and worked extensively with natural scientists across the terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms. Her engagement in global processes is strongly informed by both a national perspective and a global south perspective.