Frances Seymour

Frances Seymour is an internationally recognized expert on tropical forests and climate change. She currently serves as Senior Policy Advisor to the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. She previously served in the Biden Administration as Senior Advisor for Forests in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the U.S. Department of State.

Prior to her government service, Seymour conducted research and writing as Distinguished Senior Fellow at World Resources Institute, advised several private philanthropies, chaired the board of the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions, and served as the McCluskey Fellow in Conservation at the Yale School of the Environment (2022) and a U.S. Science Envoy (2023).

She is the lead author of the 2016 book Why Forests? Why Now? written during her tenure at the Center for Global Development. She also served for six years with ambassadorial status in Indonesia as Director General of the Bogor-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) for which she was decorated by the Government of France with the Order of Agricultural Merit. In 2025, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.