Ely Sandler

Ely Sandler is Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and senior advisor to the World Bank. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Ely’s background was in finance, where he helped run Morgan Stanley’s sustainable finance business as an advisor to the international CEO. Ely has extensive experience in Track II diplomacy, using cooperation on issues such as climate change to build links in the Middle East. He has worked in Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Mali and Sudan, and has led private sector infrastructure projects in solar, agriculture and water technology. Ely is also a founding Board Member of 50:50 Startups, the non-profit tech accelerator for Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs. 

In 2022, policy proposals that Ely developed at Harvard’s Belfer Center were presented at COP27, with the intention to create a new approach to carbon markets and climate finance. These proposals are now being adopted by the World Bank and UAE COP28 Presidency, with the hope of catalyzing trillions of dollars of green investment, in part through Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Ely’s work in this space has been highlighted in the Financial Times, and he was recently asked to join the World Economic Forum advisory board for Carbon Finance. 

Ely graduated with distinction from the University of Oxford with a first class degree in Politics, Philosophy & Economics. He holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he won a distinction for his thesis.