Silvana Baldovino Beas

Program Director

SPDA

Silvana Baldovino Beas is a lawyer graduated from the University of Lima, with a second major in environmental and natural resources law from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP).

She has more than 20 years of experience in the public and private sector, designing and implementing strategies and public policies in various aspects related to environmental and indigenous peoples’ issues, with an emphasis on the protection and promotion of biodiversity. Her approach focuses on conservation based on human rights and the defense of the collective rights of indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations, under a human rights approach.

Her areas of expertise include legal security strategies for indigenous lands, mediation and conflict resolution, revaluation of ancestral knowledge, and women’s and youth empowerment and leadership. Currently, in the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law (SPDA), she develops and implements the line of human rights and environmental defenders.

She is a professor and guest lecturer in various academic institutions at national and international level. She has been a member of the Forestry and Wildlife Tribunal of the Forestry and Wildlife Resources Oversight Agency and has presented as an expert in international tribunals on the defense of the rights of environmental defenders against threats to their territories. She is also a member of the Commission on Environmental Law and the Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

She is the author of books, compendia and guides on communal lands, natural protected areas, environmental defenders, human rights and climate change. She has also published in specialized journals on environmental law, with emphasis on indigenous peoples’ rights, communal lands and natural protected areas.

Last year, she was selected as a member of the panel of experts for the Earthshot Prize (a global platform that seeks to solve global problems through innovation). She has also been awarded as a Top Manager by APEC as an outstanding woman in project management. She has been part of several delegations to make visible the situation of indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations in Central America in situations of violation of rights and land dispossession, as an expert.

Currently, she is the director of the Biodiversity and Indigenous Peoples Program of the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law (SPDA), where she has been working since 2006.

Email: sbaldovino@spda.org.pe