Manuel Pulgar-Vidal

Manuel Pulgar-Vidal is the global leader of Climate & Energy at WWF and interim chair of the IUCN Climate Crisis Commission. He has more than 35 years of experience in environmental law and policy. He served as Minister of the Environment of Peru (2011 to 2016) and President of the Twentieth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - COP20 in 2014. 

Pulgar-Vidal was the Executive Director of the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, an influential institution in Latin America. He has a law degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, where he is a professor, and has completed studies for a master’s degree in Business Law at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas. He is a board member of Forest Trends, Amazon Conservation Association, Peruvian Society of Environmental Law, CARE-Peru and the Science Based Targets initiative and a member of the Assembly of the World Wide Fund for Nature - Colombia. 

He is also member of the Steering Committees of F20 and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative as well as a member of the Aspen Institute Management and Leadership Advisory Group, the IUCN International Committee for the Nature Based Solutions Global Standard and the advisory board of the Centre for Multilateral Negotiations – CEMUNE. He has recently been appointed as the chairman of the newly created IUCN Climate Crisis Commission as well as Champion for the Action Agenda for Nature as part of the Convention of Biological Diversity, in an effort to develop the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. He has been invited to serve on the US Advisory Committee on Foreign and Voluntary Aid.

He is the chairman of the evaluation council of the French sovereign Green Bonds. As an active member of different groups aimed at achieving strong outcomes as a part of the formal climate talks and the non-party stakeholders’ agenda, he is an Ambassador for the Race to Zero and Race to Resilience campaigns. 

He has been recognized with the Légion d´Honneur by the French Government, the Grand Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Cross of the Civil Order of Environmental Merit of the Spanish Government, the Order of Merit for distinguished Services of the Peruvian Government and the Shackleton Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his contribution to the Paris Agreement and has been inducted into the Earth Hall of Fame of Kyoto. 

Dr Stephen Cornelius

Dr Stephen Cornelius is the Deputy Global Leader & Innovation Lead of Climate & Energy at WWF.  

Cornelius joined WWF as WWF-UK’s Chief Adviser on Climate Change in 2015 and has worked at the interface of science and policy. He has been a member of WWF’s international climate and energy leadership team and was the network lead on issues around global warming of 1.5°C and the organisation’s interaction with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Cornelius led the production of several WWF flagship reports on topics including nature-based solutions and the impact of climate change on wildlife.

Hailing from Australia, Cornelius holds a PhD in Control Engineering from the University of Cambridge relating to pollution from cars. He worked for an engineering consultancy on automotive pollution control for three years in the UK and Japan. Cornelius then spent a decade in the British civil service working on climate change science, policy and as an UK and EU climate change negotiator at the international UNFCCC and IPCC climate talks where he covered issues ranging from mitigation, the Kyoto Protocol and forests and land use.

What we do:

• Cities Global Lead: Jennifer Lenhart, Jennifer.Lenhart@wwf.se
• Climate Adaptation Global Lead: Sandeep Chamling Rai, scrai@sg.org
• Climate Business Global Lead: Bhavna Prasad, bprasad@wwfint.org
• Climate and Nature Global Lead: Vanessa Morales, vmorales@wwfint.org
• Energy Global Lead: Dean Cooper, dcooper@wwf.no
• Non-state Actors Acting Global Lead: Ricardo Bosshard, ricardo.bosshard@wwf.cl
• Policy Global Lead: Fernanda De Carvalho, fcarvalho@wwfint.org