Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Driving the Ecological Transition - Ep37: Teresa Ribera

Mar 31, 2021

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Teresa Ribera, Deputy Prime Minister in the Spanish government and the Minister for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, is joining us this week on Cleaning Up. She has played a key role in Spain’s low-carbon transition and is a vocal advocate of a green COVID-19 recovery.

Bio

Since 2018 Teresa Ribera is a Deputy Prime Minister in the Spanish Government and the Minister for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge. In her role, she has advocated reorienting the Spanish economy towards green tech, put in place a €220m deal to get coal off the grid as well as negotiating a nuclear phase-out.

From 2008 to 2011 she held the position of Secretary of State for Climate Change and Biodiversity in the second administration of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Between her two ministerial stints in government, Teresa was the Director of the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations. In that capacity, she focused on influencing the negotiations towards the Paris Climate Agreement.

From 2004 to 2008 she served as Director-General of the Office of Climate Change, and prior to that, Teresa worked closely with different ministries in the Spanish government including Environment, Public Works, and Transportation.

Teresa studied law at the Complutense University of Madrid and constitutional law with political science at the Center for Constitutional Studies. Following her studies, she worked as an assistant professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She was featured in Politico’s ‘Class of 2021’ annual ranking of the most powerful people in Europe. In 2018 she received Climate Reality Project Award in the category of 'Public Personality'.