Maria del Pilar Cornejo Rodriguez

Dr Maria del Pilar Cornejo-Rodriguez is professor at ESPOL, where she is the Director of the Pacific International Center for Disaster Risk Reduction. She has been teaching undergraduate Oceanography and Aquaculture for over 34 years, and Aquaculture and Climate Change at the postgraduate level. She has worked with climate variability impacts upon socioeconomic sectors in the humid tropics of the Americas, as well as in integrated water management, environmental sustainability and disaster risk reduction. She has served in several international committees and coordinated regional programs. For a period of six years she became a policymaker as the first Secretary of State for Risk Management in Ecuador, making use of science for implementation of disaster risk reduction (DRR) actions, building up the Ecuadorian DRR system. She is part of the GEO family as member of the GEO Programme Board, the AmeriGEO Coordination WG and the GEO Capacity Building WG. Currently her work focusses on DRR, Climate Resilience, Sustainable Cities and Nature Based Solutions for DRR and Climate Change Adaptation, with emphasis on delivering public policy options to move forward the 2030 Agenda.