David Cleary

David Cleary worked at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) from 1999 until his retirement in 2025, where he was successively Director of the Amazon Programme, Director of Conservation Strategy for Latin America and Director of Global Agriculture. He oversaw the Conservancy’s work on agriculture and commodity supply chains around the world, particularly in relation to habitat loss. He helped to manage global partnerships around agriculture, land use and climate change in the public sector and the corporate world. He lived for 17 years in Brazil, and has extensive experience in the rest of Latin America, the United States and Asia, especially China and Indonesia. Prior to TNC he was an academic at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Harvard. He has a Ph.D in anthropology from Oxford University.