Tia Nelson has continued the crusade her father started and is internationally recognized for her work on climate change. She spent 17 years with The Nature Conservancy, including serving as the first director of its global Climate Change Initiative.
For her work, she received the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award in 2000. She then served 11 years as executive secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL), Wisconsin’s oldest state agency, which included a gubernatorial appointment in 2007 as co‐chair of Wisconsin’s Task Force on Global Warming.
Her outspokenness on climate change put her under political pressure and she left the BCPL to become managing director at the Outrider Foundation, which advances science-based literacy on global challenges that affect the well-being of the planet.