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 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.