John-O Niles

Executive Director
The Carbon Institute
United States

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John-O Niles is the Executive Director of The Carbon Institute, faculty with the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego.

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About John-O Niles

John-O Niles is an international expert in global climate change policies and the carbon cycle. He has written textbooks on climate change, taught at universities worldwide, launched several successful global initiatives, and created the first certificate in advanced carbon accounting. He received the 2017 Mulago Award for the Carbon Institute, and he’s been called one of the planet’s “most promising people to deliver bigger, better, and faster conservation and climate solutions”.

In 2002, John-O co-edited the first graduate textbook on climate science and policy. In 2003, he founded the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance. This alliance became the global standard for forest and climate offset projects, used on millions of hectares.

In 2006, John-O became the first Science Advisor for the Coalition of Rainforest Nations. In that role, he helped shape UN decisions for reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries (REDD+), eventually embedded in the Paris Agreement on climate change.

From 2008 to 2012, John-O ran the Tropical Forest Group, leading humanitarian conservation work and capacity strengthening in land use carbon sequestration in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. From 2012 – 2014, John-O was Director of the Forest and Climate Program at WWF US. In 2013, John-O designed, accredited and taught the first advanced Certificate in Terrestrial Carbon Accounting at the University of California San Diego. This advanced certificate (made up of six courses and 140 course hours) has been replicated in Africa and Asia and is the most advanced forest and land use carbon accounting coursework in the world.

In 2015, John-O co-founded the Carbon Institute. The Carbon Institute is an international academic partnership and non-profit, whose mission is to build the global workforce to tackle climate change. In 2017, John-O won the Mulago social entrepreneur award for scalable solutions to climate change.

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