David Jensen is the Head of the Environmental Peacebuilding Programme at UN Environment. Since 2009, David has been a leader in a global effort to establish a new multidisciplinary field of environmental peacebuilding. This field aims to promote environmental and natural resource management to prevent, mitigate, resolve, and recover from conflict. It also seeks to use shared dependence on natural resources and ecosystems as a platform for cooperation and confidence building among communities and countries. David is one of the core faculty members of the Massive Open Online Course on Environmental Security and Sustaining Peace – currently the most popular course offered by the SDG Academy with over 17,000 enrollments. David is also a founding board member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association established in 2018.

Since 2016, David has been pioneering efforts to identify environmental applications of frontier technologies in conflict-affected countries and fragile states, including big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, block chain, virtual reality, and citizen science. He has been advising the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum on the Environment on these topics since 2018 and was the co-author of a flagship discussion paper entitled The Case for a Digital Ecosystem for the Environment.