Maria del Pilar Cornejo is a professor at ESPOL, and Director of the Pacific International Center for Disaster Risk Reduction. She has been teaching in Oceanography, Aquaculture and Climate Change for over 35 years. She has worked with climate variability impacts upon socioeconomic sectors in the humid tropics of the Americas, as well as in integrated water management, environmental sustainability, and disaster risk reduction (DRR). She has served in several international committees and coordinated regional programs. For a 6-year period she became a policymaker as the first Secretary of State for Risk Management in Ecuador, making use of science for implementation of DRR actions, building up the Ecuadorian DRR system. She is part of the GEO family in AmeriGEO Coordination WG. She currently works on DRR, Climate Resilience, Sustainable Cities, Nature Based Solutions, and Climate Change Adaptation, with emphasis on delivering public policy options.