Martin Perez Lara is a forest engineer with an MSc in International Affairs, specializing in the design of environmental frameworks, carbon markets, and community-centered governance models. His work sits at the intersection of technical carbon accounting, public policy, and market design, with a strong focus on ensuring environmental integrity and equitable benefit-sharing in nature-based solutions.

He has worked across Latin America, North America, and Asia-Pacific, with experience in countries including Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, the United States, and Australia. His contributions include the development of national and subnational carbon accounting frameworks, forestry sector regulations, impact monitoring systems, and methodologies to align nature-based solutions' impact with national monitoring systems and local welfare. More recently, his work has focused on advancing Monitoring, Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MMRV) systems that integrate remote sensing, statistical causal inference, and field-based calibration to support high-integrity carbon and biodiversity outcomes. He is particularly interested in how methodological design, incentive structures, and governance arrangements interact to shape environmental performance in carbon and biodiversity markets.

Martin has contributed to the evolution of integrity frameworks in both voluntary and compliance carbon markets, with a strong emphasis on the role of benefit-sharing mechanisms, baseline design, and contractual structures. His research explores how incentives embedded in carbon projects, particularly those linked to baseline-dependent issuance, can influence both modeled and real mitigation outcomes. This work aims to bridge theoretical models with empirical analysis, especially in contexts where contractual arrangements and governance structures limit transparency.

In his current role at WWF-US, Martin leads the development of integrated strategies for carbon and biodiversity across multiple landscapes globally. His work focuses on building scalable, high-integrity supply of carbon and biodiversity outcomes, aligning project-level interventions with jurisdictional frameworks, and supporting corporate and public actors in navigating evolving market architectures, including Article 6 mechanisms.