Biography|Klaus Töpfer — The Gigiri Compound Where He Took UNEP

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

On 3 December 1997 the General Assembly elected Klaus Töpfer of Germany for a four-year term, with the official start set for 1 February 1998.

The UN press release that day named him the fourth head of the Nairobi-based programme, succeeding Elizabeth Dowdeswell of Canada.

He left the Kohl cabinet on 15 January 1998.

On 9 February the Secretary-General's spokesman announced that Töpfer had taken up the executive director's functions and that Kofi Annan had also named him Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi.

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

It is the only UN headquarters in the Global South, and it already housed both UNEP and the UN human-settlements programme.

Töpfer therefore arrived as environment chief, campus landlord, and — for a time — acting head of Habitat.

UNEP later listed the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants among the agreements of his eight years.

It also recorded his work behind the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in February 2005 after Russia's instrument of ratification was deposited at this compound in November 2004.

He chose not to seek a third term.

On 31 March 2006 he bid farewell in Nairobi.

Achim Steiner took over on 15 June.

The gates on United Nations Avenue are still the public face of the campus.

A visitor will not see Töpfer's office, but this is the ground where a German building minister became the UN's environment voice for eight years.

Photo: Klaus Töpfer, Heinrich Böll Foundation, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.