António Guterres was born in Lisbon in 1949, trained as an engineer and served as Portugal's prime minister from 1995 to 2002 before leading the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2005 to 2015. He became UN secretary-general in January 2017 and was re-elected to a second term in 2021.
His tenure has been defined by efforts to keep the multilateral system functional through overlapping crises: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the deepening climate emergency and a wave of sovereign-debt distress across the global south. He has consistently used the secretary-general's platform to argue for substantial reform of the international financial architecture, the Security Council and the global response to climate change.
Guterres is widely regarded as one of the most active secretaries-general in recent decades on climate diplomacy and on the structural reform of multilateral institutions.