Dr. Izabella Teixeira

Izabella Mônica Vieira Teixeira is a native Brazilian. She holds a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Brasília, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Energy Planning from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is also a specialist in Environmental Management, Environmental Impact Assessment and Environmental Licensing. She was Brazil´s Minister of the Environment (2010-16). From 2008 to 2010, she was the Deputy Minister of the Environment. A career public servant, Mrs Teixeira has held a position at the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Resources since 1984. She had also held several high-level management and advisory positions as Head of the Institute’s Environmental Quality Department, Task Leader of the National Environmental Program (with the World Bank), of the National Program on Chemicals, and the Pantanal Wetlands Program (with the Inter-American Development Bank). She also held positions at the State of Rio de Janeiro as Supervisor of Environmental Studies, Task Leader of the Clean-up Program of the Guanabara Bay, Chief of Staff of Rio´s Secretariat for the Environment and Undersecretary for the Environment. Today she works as a private consultant on environmental and climate change issues. 

Her international experience comes from being head of the Brazilian Delegation and Chairperson of the Group of Like-Minded Mega Diverse Countries and of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. She has also been head of the Brazilian Delegation in the Cancun, Durban, Doha and Warsaw Conferences of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and of the Brazil-South Africa-India-China (BASIC) Group. At the invitation of UN´s Secretary General, she was a member of the High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability. She was also a key leader of the 2012 UN´s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development. After Rio+20 she was again appointed by the UN´s Secretary-General as a member of the High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. In 2013, she signed, on behalf of the Brazilian Government, the Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Mrs Teixeira’s guidance and leadership was instrumental in the approval of the new Forest Code in the National Congress in 2012, for achieving the lowest historical deforestation rates in the Amazon, and consequently the largest global contribution for emissions reduction, for structuring a comprehensive national policy on climate change engaging with key economic sectors as energy, agriculture, and industry, and for building and proposing a new framework for use of genetic resources and benefit sharing to the National Congress. In 2015, Mrs Teixeira was Head of the Brazilian Delegation on negotiations of the Paris Agreement of the UN Convention on Climate Change.

For her outstanding career, in 2013 Mrs Teixeira received the United Nations Environment Programme’s Champions of the Earth award for Policy Leadership.

In 2017, she was elected as co-chair of the International Resource Panel.