The World Health Organization has paid tribute to Dr David Nabarro, the veteran global health diplomat and adviser whose career spanned some of the most consequential public health and development challenges of the past quarter-century. Nabarro died on Friday 25 July at his home at the age of 75, the agency said, describing him as a widely respected champion of health, equity and disadvantaged people worldwide.
In a statement, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was "Deeply shocked and saddened by the passing of our dear friend, colleague and WHO Envoy David Nabarro. David was a great champion of global health and health equity, and a wise, generous mentor to countless individuals. His work touched and impacted so many lives across the world. On behalf of WHO, I'm extending our heartfelt condolences to David's family, friends and colleagues. Rest in peace, my dear friend. We will dearly miss your expertise, wisdom and kindness."
The tribute reflects the breadth of Nabarro's influence, which extended far beyond one institution or one emergency. At WHO, he worked at the forefront of malaria control, humanitarian crisis response and outbreak management. Most recently, he served as WHO Special Envoy on COVID-19, a role that placed him at the center of the world's most disruptive public health crisis in generations. Colleagues said he was known not only for strategic judgment, but for the patience and compassion that made him a trusted guide to younger professionals and senior officials alike.
Nabarro's career was marked by a rare ability to move between health, nutrition, food systems and climate policy, often connecting issues that are too frequently treated in isolation. From 1999 to 2005, he held senior leadership positions at WHO, first as Executive Director responsible for the Roll Back Malaria Project and the Office of the Director-General, and later as the Director-General's Special Representative for Health Action in Crises. Those years placed him in the middle of efforts to confront disease burdens and humanitarian emergencies that demanded both technical expertise and political skill.
He joined the United Nations in 2005 and went on to hold a series of senior roles that underscored his reputation as a problem-solver in complex global systems. He served as UN System Senior Coordinator for Avian and Pandemic Influenza from 2005 to 2014, the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Food Security and Nutrition from 2008 to 2014, and Coordinator of the Movement for Scaling Up Nutrition from 2011 to 2014 as Assistant Secretary-General. He later became the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the West Africa Ebola Outbreak Response from 2014 to 2015, and Special Adviser for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Climate Change from 2016 to 2017 as Under-Secretary-General.
His work on climate and health became increasingly central in the later years of his career. In 2015, the WHO Director-General appointed him chair of the expert group on reforming WHO's work on outbreaks and emergencies. In October 2018, he received the World Food Prize for leadership on nutrition, recognition of the influence he had built in global efforts to address hunger and malnutrition.
Nabarro was also deeply involved in academic and civil society initiatives. From mid-2019 to 2025, he served as Co-Director and Chair of Global Health at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. In 2018, he founded the Swiss-based 4SD Foundation, or Skills Systems and Synergies for Sustainable Development, with Florence Lasbennes, with a mission to train and mentor leaders for sustainable development. Through that platform, he helped shape the Food Systems Dialogues between 2018 and 2025, contributing to the transformation of food systems and to preparations for the UN's September 2019 Climate Action Summit.
He also co-facilitated the coalition that advanced the Nature-Based Solutions workstream, co-led by China and New Zealand, and co-chaired the forum on Climate Change and Health that completed its work at the World Innovation Summit for Health in November 2020. Under his strategic leadership, 4SD led the Summit Dialogues that contributed to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit, from which a network of National Convenors of Food Systems transformation has emerged.
For WHO and the wider UN community, Nabarro's death removes a figure who combined technical authority with an unusually broad systems view of global risk. His career traced the links between outbreaks, malnutrition, fragile health systems, climate stress and inequity long before those connections became mainstream in policy debates. The tributes now being paid suggest that his legacy will endure not only in the institutions he served, but in the people he mentored and the frameworks he helped build for a more integrated response to global crises.