Dan Reifsnyder

Senior Fellow, Climate Advisers

Dan Reifsnyder is a Senior Fellow at Climate Advisers, where he advises the organization’s strategic initiatives. 

He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and serves on the boards of the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the Congo Basin Institute. He spent over 40 years in Federal Service, most recently at the Department of State, where he was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and led U.S. efforts across a wide range of environmental issues.   In 2015, he co-chaired the U.N. negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement on climate change. He began working on the climate issue in 1989 and helped negotiate both the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. He also taught at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.

Dr. Reifsnyder earned a Ph.D. in international relations at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has a law degree from George Washington University and a master’s degree in Russian Area Studies from Georgetown University. He did his undergraduate degree at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and studied in Leningrad and Paris. He is a member of the Virginia and District of Columbia bars. He has received numerous awards including three Presidential Rank Awards, EPA’s Ozone Layer Protection Award and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy’s Leadership Award.

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