Timothy Damon is founder and president of the Global Youth Development Institute (GYDI), an internationally-oriented 501(c)(3) with the mission of educating and empowering young people across the world as leaders for action on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals. Damon has acquired extensive experience since 2011 working in and around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), through the varied roles of an academic researcher, youth advocate, and an adviser and negotiator for government delegations on youth and education matters.

In 2016, he served as the democratically elected Focal Point for YOUNGO (the official youth constituency of the UNFCCC). Prior to this, he was a leader in the youth efforts which succeeded in having the principle of “intergenerational equity” recognized in the Paris Agreement, which became the first document in the history of international environmental law to do so. In 2018, he was a leading organizer—alongside the COP23 Presidency and UNFCCC Secretariat—in convening the first-ever youth forum on Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) held under the climate convention.