Tropical Forest Leadership Summit

For over three decades, the Yale Chapter of the International Society of Tropical Foresters (ISTF) has hosted one of the world’s most respected student-led conferences on tropical forests. In 2026, we will host the Tropical Forest Leadership Summit. While proudly maintaining our heritage as the 32nd Annual ISTF Conference, this evolution reflects our ambition to elevate the summit as a multidisciplinary platform for co-creating solutions at the nexus of ecology, finance, and policy.

The Tropical Forest Leadership Summit will be hosted in a hybrid format at the Yale School of the Environment, with both in-person and virtual participation. Programming will include keynote addresses, panel discussions, technical sessions, innovation pitch presentations, workshops, poster sessions, and informal networking events. We aim to foster inclusive, multilingual, and cross-disciplinary exchanges throughout the conference.

We welcome participation from ecologists, students, community leaders, financiers, technologists, legal scholars, Indigenous knowledge holders, journalists, artists, and policy-makers—particularly those from the Global South and historically underrepresented groups.

Cosponsored by the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies.