From establishing The Nature Conservancy’s presence in Panama to serving as the country’s first minister of the environment, Mirei Endara de Heras has dedicated her career to addressing environmental challenges
As Panama’s first minister of the environment, Mirei Endara de Heras ’94 MESc has promoted sustainable development, incentivized reforestation, developed a national water security plan to bolster the Panama Canal, and built alliances with other rainforest nations to protect forests. She also helped establish Marea Verde (Green Tide), a conservation nonprofit that utilizes clean technologies to collect floating debris from rivers, empowers communities, and advocates for science-based policies.
“For years, I was troubled with the plastic pollution in our coastline and oceans, something I witnessed every time I went for a walk around my community,” she said. “After leaving my most recent government position as minister of the environment in 2017, I decided to do something about it and formed Marea Verde with a group of like-minded neighbors willing to take action together.”
Endara de Heras put her efforts into promoting local action after serving in the Panamanian government twice, first as administrator of the Panama Environmental Authority from 1994-1999, and later as minister of environment from 2014-2017. In those roles, she elevated the environment to a cabinet-level position and worked in alliance with other government and private institutions to establish a common vision and strategic priorities that aligned with sustainable development principles.
Between her government positions, she established and directed The Nature Conservancy’s Panama program and was a fellow and first executive director of Fundación CALI (Central America Leadership Initiative), where she helped to create the Central American program of the Aspen Global Leadership Network — a worldwide community of more than 3,000 high-integrity, entrepreneurial leaders from business, government, and the nonprofit sector.
Her work has earned her the Yale School of the Environment’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which honors the achievements of YSE graduates who have made significant contributions to conservation, environmental science, and management.
Endara de Heras, who graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in biochemistry, came to YSE after working in biotechnology. She said the field and lifestyle wasn’t for her. She was interested in YSE because of its focus on agroforestry.
“For me, the YSE experience changed my life, opened many a door, and enabled me to have a purposeful career,” Endara de Heras said, “With every class I took at YSE and every work experience after that, a new piece of a puzzle was added. It's a puzzle I am still enthusiastically working on, understanding all the interconnections in the natural system and our impacts on it. I am forever grateful to YSE for helping me discover my passion.”
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After piloting several different, small-scale actions around plastic cleanup, including beach and mangrove cleanups, environmental education programs in public schools, and social media campaigns, Marea Verde is now looking to scale a project on the Juan Díaz river that installed a trash wheel, Wanda, that prevents floating trash from reaching the oceans. Wanda has collected more than 245,000 kilos (539,000 pounds) of waste since September of 2022 and the nonprofit is working to equip six other rivers in Panama City, which all drain into Panama Bay, with trash wheels. The Juan Diaz project also established an interactive environmental education center, La Casa de Wanda, which explains the plastic pollution problem and inspires visitors to take action. La Casa de Wanda has received more than 2000 visitors since July 2024.
“We ultimately need to solve the root causes of this plastic pollution problem, a bigger and more complex social problem that goes beyond our environmental nonprofit’s scope of work. Our aim is to provide local information to authorities, while facilitating strategic infrastructure with urban planning to prevent trash from entering the river system. An example of this is a map of‘garbage hotspots generated with drones to help local authorities prioritize problem areas, design smart solutions, and monitor the impact of these solutions,” Endara de Heras said.
To curve plastic pollution by up to 75%, Marea Verde is promoting global changes in plastic reduction efforts and advocating for UN plastic treaty negotiations to mandate policies such as capping plastic production to 2020 levels; requiring a minimum of 40% recycled content in packaging; reducing single-use packaging; and creating appropriate recycling infrastructure.
“Plastic production increases exponentially every year; it will triple by 2060 to 1.2 billion tons per year. Thirty-six percent of that production is single-use plastics, which make up most of the plastic pollution,” Endara de Heras said. “We can evade this grim scenario by acting now in a consistent and responsible way.”
