Daniel Ortega Pacheco

Daniel has fifteen years of experience in environmental public policy, sustainable finance, bioeconomy, and climate & water advocacy.

He is Director of the Center of Public Policy Development at ESPOL Polytechnic University, Ecuador’s leading higher-education institution, focused on mainstreaming sustainable development into policy and practice. Daniel is also the Coordinator of the Sustainable Finance Initiative, the principal public-private partnership mobilizing public and private sector and d institutional investors in support of sustainable development goals achievement.

His current research aims at contributing to unleash the transformative role that Sustainable Finance can play in Latin-American with support from the Impact and Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium. He is working closely with the International Finance Corporation to launch Ecuador’s first executive training for financial leaders on Sustainability Bonds.

Daniel has worked closely with climate finance and international negotiations in major multilateral environmental agreements for many years and has been a member of the United Nations Executive Board for the Clean Development Mechanism, the Global Environmental Facility, the International Renewable Energy Agency.

He served as Minister of Environment and was instrumental to achieve an ambitious outcome on resource mobilization for reducing deforestation as part of the Paris Climate Agreement. He also led the creation of the first hummer-head shark Marine Sanctuary of Galapagos, the new Organic Environmental Code, the National Strategies for Biodiversity & Net Zero Deforestation. He served as Undersecretary-General of the National Secretariat of Political Management in charge of promoting a new model of participatory & inclusive governance.

He has given seminars and conferences at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in Korea, Canning House in the United Kingdom, CATIE's Latin American Environmental Economics Program, among others. He is the author of various research on bioeconomy and sustainable finance with publications in international journals and book chapters. He has consulted for the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, Conservation International and the United Nations Development Program and accompanies the efforts of the United Nations Office for Sustainable Development.

Ortega holds a Ph.D. in public policy and management from the Ohio State University. He graduated with honors from EARTH University with a BA in Agricultural Science and earned an MSc in Agricultural & Environmental Economics from Michigan State University.

He lives in Guayaquil with his sons, and her wife Paula.