In 1985, Juan Carlos Navarro made a defining decision for the rest of his career. He had just completed a Master’s in Public Policy at Harvard and came from a well connected business family. Instead of pursuing a career in business or in politics, he returned to Panama and co-founded ANCON, the National Association for the Conservation of Nature, becoming its first Executive Director and building it from the ground up into one of Panama’s most influential environmental organisations, with over four decades of uninterrupted conservation work. The organisation’s founders were described as ‘visionaries’ precisely because, at the time, no dedicated national NGO existed to fulfil the role of protecting and restoring the Panamanian natural heritage and spreading awareness on sustainable practices. Such efforts depended heavily on private initiative, with no state mandate and no established funding base to draw on.
Navarro took this responsibility as he wanted the organisation to be a tool capable of convincing Panamanians of the importance of conservation as an essential source of economic value for Panama. In an interview from 2015, he stated that ANCON helped convince around 90% of Panamanians that conservation should be a national priority, which was measured through surveys. This marks the moment in which his personal beliefs became a public campaign. His defining moment is not a crisis or failure, but a decision shaped by his belief in the importance of conservation.
His later work as the Environmental Ambassador of Panama, his green urban policies as Mayor, his founding of NSOLAR, and his flagship policies as Minister are not separate chapters of a political career, they are the continuation of a single conviction formed in 1985: that conservation is not an obstacle to development, but its foundation.
During and after his time at the organisation, ANCON helped put conservation into practice. In its earliest years, Navarro led the organisation’s first major project: securing and managing Parque Soberanía, which was founded in 1980 after the Panama Canal Treaty came into effect to protect the forests directly adjacent to the Canal and its water supply. ANCON then went on, under his stewardship, to help establish Parque Chagres, which was five times larger than the first one, protecting the watershed that supplies the expanded Canal. The organisation also co-created the Parque Internacional La Amistad in the highlands of Chiriquí, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve of global significance. Later, in 1993, ANCON established the Punta Patiño Private Natural Reserve, the largest private reserve in Panama, covering 30.000 hectares of Darién forest and absorbing around 180.000 tonnes of CO₂. By the time he left the organisation it had grown into a large and impactful environmental NGO, which helped the government found half of the national reserves of the country. It grew to become a major contributor to the country’s conservation efforts.
IE x RAIA Summer Research Programme:
This article is an excerpt from a report on Juan Carlos Navarro produced as part of a RAIA research programme on climate leaders. For a full picture of Navarro’s climate leadership, including the sources, read the full report. This project was fully financed by IE University’s School of Politics, Economics and Global Affairs and School of Science and Technology.
Authors: Giulia-Elena Curt, Lucia María Sven Piederiet & Yassine Abada
Editor: Clarisa Gorrín
Project Lead: Dario Hasenstab
