Eleni Myrivili
She/Her/Hers
Eleni “Lenio” Myrivili is the Global Chief Heat Officer for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center (formerly known as Arsht-Rock). Myrivili facilitates the Climate Resilience Center’s partnership with UN-Habitat, working with the agency to raise awareness of heat as a growing threat to public health and advance heat response and resilience measures in cities worldwide. As Global Chief Heat Officer, Myrivili provides technical expertise for designing and implementing extreme heat-related initiatives, supports policies that enable the mainstreaming of heat in local planning, and builds on synergies to address urban heat in local climate change mitigation and adaptation frameworks.
Myrivili is a member of the European Union Mission Board for Adaptation at the European Commission, is a heat resilience advisor to the Global Covenant of Mayors, serves on the advisory board for the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report, and a member of WEF’s Global Future Council for the Future Economics of Equitable Transition. She recently became a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research, where she was honored with the 2023 Lawrence C. Nussdorf Urban Leadership Prize. Most recently, Myrivili was recognized among Nature’s ten people who helped shape science in 2023 as well as Earth.org’s ten women leading the fight against climate change.
In 2014 Myrivili was elected to city government and appointed as Athens’ deputy mayor for urban nature, urban resilience, and climate adaptation. During her tenure and then subsequently from a senior advisor position, she served as Athens’ chief resilience officer and chief heat officer, contributing to the city’s leading role in international urban climate adaptation efforts. Following her term in city government, she also became a 2020 resident Loeb fellow at Harvard University, was contracted as a heat expert by the World Bank, and co-chaired the Steering Committee of the Resilient Cities Network.
Myrivili’s climate-resilience expertise has earned her international recognition, including an opportunity to speak at TED talk Global and an invitation to speak to the House of Commons in British Parliament, while she features in prominent media outlets like CNN and NHK World, the New York Times, Monocle, and Politico, where she was part of the media company’s list of the twenty-eight of most influential Europeans in 2022. Formerly, she was a tenured university professor and holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.
