Carter S. Roberts ’82
Washington, DC

Region II Candidate

“One of the great challenges of the 21st century will be inventing ways to meet the needs of people without destroying the planet upon which we depend,” says Carter Roberts ’82, President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Wildlife Fund. As a child, he played in the woods near his home. “I grew up addicted to the natural world and keenly aware of its importance to people,” he explains.

A History major, Roberts has an M.B.A. from Harvard. On first leaving Princeton he started in the management training program at Procter and Gamble. He moved to Dun and Bradstreet in 1983, and went on to hold various management positions at Gillette. He notes that his Princeton thesis, “which examined the role of business leaders who turned non-profits into greater forces for change, no doubt influenced the first steps of my career.”

While on one of many climbing trips, Roberts says he “decided to change career paths and devote my time to protecting the environment.” Initially, he became Executive Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Massachusetts Office, then Vice President of the Central America Program and then went on to lead science and strategic planning efforts for the organization.

In 2004 he joined the World Wildlife Fund, which saw revenue grow from $115 million to $240 million by 2007 and earned the ranking by Charity Navigator as one of the country’s top ten charities. WWF works across 100 countries and enjoys the support of one million members in the US and five million members around the world.

Carter’s accomplishments at WWF have been impressive. He has pushed WWF to tackle global forces like climate change, commercial logging, international fisheries management, supply chains and more. He assisted in establishing over 20 million acres of protected areas in the Amazon Basin, helped catalyze multinational accords to protect coral reefs in the Pacific, and partnered with the Coca Cola Companies to create greater water efficiency in their bottling plants and supply chain. He launched an initiative addressing deforestation in the context of climate change.

“I have the great good fortune to be able to collaborate with inspiring leaders in countries around the world, to work to solve some of the greatest challenges of our time, and to see first-hand the natural wealth of our planet -- a breathtaking array of creatures and cultures we are at great risk of losing,” he says.

On his first trip into the Congo, a bull elephant charged him and only at the last second was he pulled to safety by a guide. “One of the most exciting moments in my job was coming face to face with one of the animals we’re trying to save and having him try to kill me.”

His philanthropic work includes being on the board of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy at Duke University; the board of Grantham Climate Institute at the London School of Economics; and the board of Interaction -- a collaborative between poverty, environment and faith-based organizations. He has also maintained ties to Princeton. Currently, he and Professor David Wilcove are studying the ecological and social dimensions of deforestation in the Heart of Borneo.

An optimist, Carter firmly believes in giving back to the community and the power of pulling together scientists, governments, businesses and communities to solve problems like “malaria, climate change and resource scarcity.” Carter says, “I believe that Princeton -- with its liberal arts focus and its world-class faculty in climate change, science, public policy, biology, engineering, and more -- has a central role to play in the process.”