Lord David Puttnam is best known for a wide-ranging career in film, education and the environment as well as his work as an active Peer in the House of Lords.
He spent thirty years as an independent producer of award-winning films including The Mission, The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone and Local Hero. Together these films have won ten Oscars, ten Golden Globes, nine Emmy’s, twenty-five Baftas and the Palme D’Or at Cannes.
Lord Puttnam retired from film production in 1998 to focus on his work in public policy as it relates to education, the creative and communications industries and the environment.
While filming Local Hero in the early 1980s, Lord Puttnam was invited to become president of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), a position that helped cement his life-long passion for the environment. This commitment to safeguarding the planet was further consolidated when he became founding chair of Forum for the Future and culminated in his chairmanship of the Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Committee on the world’s first Climate Change Bill. The eventual Act for which this committee was responsible (the Climate Change Act of 2007) contained the principal carbon limits and ‘terms of trade’ still adhered to today. It also remains a benchmark to which many other nations aspire.
He was Founding Chair of the National Memorial Arboretum and for a number of years a Trustee of the Eden Project in Cornwall. His continued support for environmental matters was underlined by his appointment as International Ambassador for WWF and as a founding member of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.