Laura Lopez is a senior international adviser and conference operations leader with more than three decades of experience delivering complex global events and intergovernmental processes at the United Nations. At UN Climate (UNFCCC), she spent eight years as Director of Conference Affairs, where she was responsible for the operational delivery of the UN’s largest annual conference, the Conference of the Parties (COP), for up to 80,000 participants from 198 member states and civil society.
For COP30, Lopez served as Strategic Adviser to the government of Brazil. She has negotiated host-country agreements, aligned governments, UN entities and civil society around shared objectives and kept high-stakes, politically sensitive processes functioning under public and diplomatic scrutiny. Her career also includes senior roles with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), as well as 15 years as a Time magazine bureau chief covering Latin America.
