Tom Cors
Senior Director of Legislative Affairs
North Carolina
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AREA OF EXPERTISE
public policy, land and water conservation, restoration and management, natural climate solutions
Biography
Tom Cors is the Senior Director of Legislative Affairs for The Nature Conservancy. In this role, he leads the organization’s work to create United States government policies related to conservation and climate action in the U.S. and globally. For example, he successfully led TNC’s campaign to pass the Great American Outdoors Act in 2020. This legislation permanently and fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund. He also successfully lobbied for historic levels of funding for natural climate solutions in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
Also during his tenure at TNC, he has led the organization’s government relations work in North Carolina. Among his achievements in that role are protecting the state’s conservation trust funds during the great recession and serving as the chair of the state’s land coalition.
Prior to joining TNC, he was a lobbyist for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He, too, worked on environmental security issues and was a legal consultant for the U.N. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity for several negotiations of the Biosafety Protocol. He was an agroforestry extension agent in the Peace Corps in Senegal.
Cors has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Davidson College and an administrative law certificate from the University of Paris’ Jean Monnet School of Law. He holds a juris doctor degree from Vermont Law School and is admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.