Giulio Boccaletti, PhD, is the Scientific Director of CMCC.
Over the past two decades his career has spanned academia, the private and not-for-profit sectors. Trained as a physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy, he earned his PhD in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University as a NASA Earth Systems Science Fellow, and was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on a range of issues from the general circulation of the ocean to turbulence theory.
He joined McKinsey & Company, where he became a partner, one of the leaders of the firm’s Sustainability and Resource Productivity Practice, and the co-founder of its Water Practice. He served clients across the private sector on strategy and organizational issues, and international institutions and national governments on natural resource security, infrastructure strategy, and economic development. He left McKinsey to join The Nature Conservancy, the largest environmental conservation organization in the world, overseeing its water programs across 40+ countries. In 2016 became the organization’s Chief Strategy Officer, leading the performance transformation for outcomes of an institution of close to 4,000 people and 1.5 billion dollars a year. He has been a member of the Global Agenda Council on Water and of the Global Futures Council on Natural Resource Security of the World Economic Forum, which named him a Young Global Leader in 2014.
He left TNC in 2020 to co-found Chloris Geospatial, a venture-backed geospatial analytics company focused on the application of remote sensing and machine learning on evaluating natural assets. He also teaches a class on Strategy for Earth at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University, and is the Executive Producer of an upcoming PBS/BBC Studios series on “the future of nature”. He is a published author. His book Water: A Biography (Pantheon Books) was released in September 2021 and has been translated into several languages. The Economist named it one of the best books of 2021. His second book, Siccità (Mondadori), is on the drought and floods that hit Italy in 2022-23. He is now working on his third book. He writes regularly for Project Syndicate and for Il Foglio.
