H.E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak was elected President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in September 2021. She is the second woman to lead the organization in its 75-year history and its first president from West Asia. She also serves as UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for the leadership team of COP28 UAE, which will take place in Dubai from November 30 to December 12, 2023.

For more than 20 years, Razan has played a vital role in guiding the United Arab Emirates toward a more sustainable future while spearheading progressive environmental protection, species conservation, and climate action across West Asia and globally.

Her diverse experience leading the largest environmental regulatory agency in the Middle East, an international philanthropic organization supporting species conservation projects worldwide, and an NGO focused on citizen engagement earned her recognition as one of the top 100 Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in 2018.

Lawyer by profession, politician by choice, and conservationist at heart, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez was elected as CEO and Chairperson of the Global Environment Facility by its governing body, the GEF Council, in June 2020.

The former Costa Rican Environment and Energy Minister was a pioneer in the development of Payment for Ecosystem Services initiatives and strategies for forest restoration, ocean conservation, and de-carbonization, and is an internationally recognized expert on environmental policy, multilateral environmental negotiations, and financing for nature conservation. During his three terms as Minister of Environment and Energy, Costa Rica doubled the size of its forests, made its electric sector 100 percent clean and renewable, and consolidated a National Park System that has positioned the Central American country as a prime ecotourism destination.

Rodríguez has held various technical and political positions over the past 30 years. In the early 1990s, he worked as Director of Costa Rica’s National Parks Service and is also founder and board member of many environmental NGOs and tropical research institutes. Since the 1992 UN Sustainable Development Summit in Rio, he has participated in all multilateral environmental negotiations, as an expert negotiator in UNFCCC, CBD, and UNCCD, and participated in negotiations for the creation and implementation of the GEF and the Green Climate Fund.  After his second tenure as Minister, he was Vice-President for Global Policy at Conservation International, for 12 years, working in 30 tropical countries in Central and South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Wade Crowfoot serves as California’s Natural Resources Secretary, leading efforts to conserve California’s environment and natural resources. He has served as Secretary since 2019 and advises Governor Newsom as a member of his cabinet.

Secretary Crowfoot oversees an agency of over 25,000 employees spread across 26 departments, commissions, and conservancies. His agency is charged with stewarding California’s forests and natural lands, rivers and water supplies, and coast and ocean. It also protects natural places, wildlife and biodiversity, and helps oversee the state’s world-leading clean energy transition.

 Laura Turner Seydel is an international environmental advocate and eco-living expert dedicated to creating a healthy and sustainable future for our children. Laura is chairperson of the Captain Planet Foundation, which has worked worldwide for 27 years to activate generations of environmentally literate children empowered to protect and sustain the natural systems upon which all life depends. She is a director of and works with the Environmental Working Group to limit the toxic chemicals in food, air, water and consumer products.  In 1994, she and her husband co-founded Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.

Tracy Farrell FN’23 has more than 20 years of experience leading global conservation and sustainable development programs and projects. She believes it takes a village of partners to broaden how the private and public sectors work together to find the best long-term sustainability solutions.

At the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) North American program, she leads policy development and member engagement work in the US and Canada, fundraising and implementing new regional initiatives. Tracy’s role at IUCN allows her to focus on large landscape management and nature-based solutions, including incentivizing and unlocking financing for these solutions.

Her career also includes years of work designing and managing sustainable forested areas. Prior to her role at IUCN, Tracy spent 16 years working for Conservation International.

Leonor Zalabata Torres is an indigenous leader from the Arhuaco Nation, and the first indigenous woman Colombian Ambassador to the United Nations.

After completing degrees at Harvard and MIT, Santiago Pardo Sanchez focuses on sustainability and climate tech.

Born in Colombia but raised outside of Atlanta, Santiago has worked throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific. He is currently working in the Strategy and Research team at Context Labs where he is working on utilizing data to catalyze action against climate change. He is a managing editor of Harvard Mapping Past Societies, a digital atlas project within the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, where he focuses on climate change, economic, and political projects. Previously, he served in the United States Peace Corps in Vanuatu where he focused on climate change mitigation and renewable energy transitions.

Sandra Bessudo is the Assessor to the Vice President of Colombia for the oceans, and the Founder and Director of the Fundación Malpelo y otros Ecosistemas Marinos.

In this role she carried out the management plan for the island of Malpelo (Colombia), which has had protected area status since 1995, was recognized as a “particularly sensitive area” by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sandra Bessudo is recognized for her commitment to ocean conservation. She has led numerous scientific expeditions and research projects. In January 2012, she was appointed Executive Director of the Colombian Presidential Agency of International Cooperation (APC-Colombia), and in 2013 President of the Colombian Commission of the Ocean and Representative of the Colombian Government to the International Whaling Commission (CBI). Sandra Bessudo was also High Advisor for Environmental Policy, Biodiversity, Water and Climate Change to the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos Calderón.

She has a degree in Marine Biology from the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE), and a Master’s degree in Life and Earth Sciences from Perpignan (France); she is also a professional diver (with over 7,000 dives).

Sandra Bessudo has received many distinctions, including the Medal of the Oceanographic Institute awarded by the Board of Directors of the Oceanographic Institute of the Albert I Prince of Monaco Foundation.

Wade Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 2000 and 2013 he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

An ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland.

Davis, one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, and was the recipient of the 2011 Explorers Medal, among many other honors and awards.

In 2018 he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.

Gilberto Salcedo is a lawyer from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and a specialist in Public Management and Administrative Institutions from the same university. His current objective at ProColombia is to position the country as an attractive, responsible, sustainable and high-quality destination, emphasizing in the biodiversity and cultural richness that the country offers. He has more than 18 years of experience in the public and private sectors, working in air transport, foreign relations, and information and communication technologies.