Maritta Koch-Weser

Maritta Koch-Weser has a distinguished career spanning more than three decades in international development, as anthropologist and environmentalist. She has field experience in Latin America, South & East Asia, and in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and some countries of the Former Soviet Union. She has led major environmental & social assessment tasks, as well as investment programs in the environment, agriculture, forestry, mining, energy, and urban-industrial sectors.

Maritta Koch-Weser is Founder and President of Earth3000. As a non-profit organization founded in 2001, Earth3000 supports strategic innovations in governance for environment and development.

Since 2009 Dr. Koch-Weser also leads the Amazônia em Transformação: História e Perspectivas program at the Institute of Advanced Studies. In this context she spearheads work on the establishment of the world’s first Rainforest Business School.

Related to her Brazil work Maritta Koch-Weser is a non-resident Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Institute, Washington DC, for the 2013-2015 period.

In her earlier career, Dr. Koch-Weser worked for some 20 years at the World Bank, in Washington DC, as Director for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development for the Latin America and Caribbean Region, as head of Asia Environment Programs, and earlier as head of the World Bank’s central Environmental Assessments and Programs Division.

Subsequently, Dr. Koch-Weser served as Director General of IUCN -The World Conservation Union, the foremost global environmental umbrella organization.

Maritta Koch-Weser holds a 1975 Ph.D. from the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, Germany. She taught Anthropology at George Washington University, and received a 2010 Honorary Doctorate from Oxford Brookes University, UK.