Niels Holm-Nielsen is Practice Manager for Disaster Management and Resilience Solutions and Impact in the Infrastructure Vertical Practice Unit of the World Bank Group, and Head of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), a donor partnership. He oversees a multidisciplinary team of partnership specialists, risk analytics and risk management experts, and financing professionals responsible for structuring, funding, and delivering knowledge and data services to World Bank Group teams engaged in the planning and implementation of financing operations. His team also delivers capacity building and knowledge academies on disaster risk management, crisis preparedness, and infrastructure resilience.
Previously, Mr. Holm-Nielsen served as Global Technical Lead for Climate Resilience and Disaster Risk Management (DRM) at the World Bank, supporting task teams and managers across the institution to ensure the highest technical quality of DRM-related services offered to client countries. In this role, he led and co-led the design and implementation of several global technical assistance and knowledge partnerships, including initiatives focused on risk reduction for education facilities and the World Bank City Resilience Program.
He has also held the position of Lead DRM Specialist for the Africa Region, where he managed a team focused on urban and coastal resilience, hydrometeorological services, disaster risk financing and insurance, and emergency response and recovery. Prior to this role, he led the Disaster Risk Management team serving clients in the Latin America and Caribbean Region.
Mr. Holm-Nielsen joined the World Bank in 2006 in the Middle East and North Africa Region, where he worked on integrated water management, climate adaptation, and disaster risk management operations in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, and Yemen. Before joining the World Bank, he spent five years at the Inter-American Development Bank, where he contributed to the development of the institution’s corporate policy on disaster risk management and helped establish DRM as a core development practice.
He holds a Master of Science in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark.