Biography|Erik Solheim — The Nairobi Compound Where He Took UNEP

UNEP's executive director is elected in New York and then has to take the job in Nairobi.

On 13 May 2016 the General Assembly elected Erik Solheim of Norway for a four-year term after Ban Ki-moon's nomination.

He succeeded Achim Steiner.

The first working day at headquarters was 27 June 2016.

UN Environment's own Nairobi release dated that Monday as the start of tenure, with the rank of Under-Secretary-General.

The compound sits on United Nations Avenue in Gigiri, beside Karura Forest.

It is the only UN headquarters in the Global South, and it houses UNEP and UN-Habitat together.

Solheim arrived from the OECD DAC chair and from a UNEP special-envoy brief on environment, conflict and disaster.

He left on 22 November 2018 after an Office of Internal Oversight Services audit of official travel.

Joyce Msuya became officer in charge.

The pin is the Gigiri compound on the day he actually took the chair, not the General Assembly hall two oceans away.

The site remains a working UN campus with security screening.

It is not a memorial.

UNEP biographies often collapse the dates into a single 2016–2018 line.

The line that can be walked is this avenue and this gate on a June Monday.

Inger Andersen later took the elected post in 2019.

The compound outlasted the tenure, which is the point of pinning an institution rather than a person.

Photo: portrait of Solheim in public office, Lars Røed Hansen, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.