2026 ENCATC Policy Debate

Lodovico Folin Calabi was appointed as UNESCO Representative to the European Union in March 2025. Prior to this, he served as Senior Crisis Coordinator at UNESCO Headquarters, leading the organization's overall response to the war in Ukraine (2022-2024) and was Chief of Taskforce in the Director-General's Cabinet (2019-2022), supervising the Organisation's flagship recovery and reconstruction initiatives Revive the Spirit of Mosul (since 2019) and Li Beirut (since 2020), coordinating the large-scale efforts for the reconstruction and recovery of the Old City of Mosul in Iraq and of Beirut after the August 2020 blast. 

He has been UNESCO Representative to Palestine and Head of the UNESCO National Office for Palestine from 2014 to 2019. From 2012 until 2014, he was the UNESCO Representative to Libya and Head of the UNESCO Project Office in Tripoli, where he coordinated the reactivation of UNESCO's overall development cooperation with Libya after the 2011 conflict. Previously, Lodovico Folin Calabi worked with the UNESCO Culture Sector since 2003, first at the World Heritage Centre until July 2011, and then at the Executive Office of the Assistant Director-General, where he was in charge of the overall coordination of the UNESCO flagship initiative “Culture: a Bridge to Development" in South-East Europe.