Woodrow Clark II was born in 1945 in Columbus, Ohio. He studied at the University of Illinois, Urbana, at Roosevelt University and at the Loyola University in Chicago. After getting three degrees, he earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980, he founded a company to make educational programs and documentaries about health issues and topical social matters such as sexual molestation. In the early 1990s, he was appointed as Manager of Strategic Planning for Technology Transfer in the Environment and Energy Sector at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1997, he was appointed as director of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, where his particular focus was the transfer of technology from developed to developing nations. In 1999, he was the Visiting Professor of Science, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Aalborg University in Denmark. From 2000 to 2003, he held the role of Senior Policy Advisor to the Governor of California, Gray Davis, for Renewable Energy, Emerging Technologies and Finance, where he was responsible for the planning and implementation of California’s hydrogen economy and its "hydrogen freeway." In 2004, he founded Clark Strategic Partners, whose clients include the Community College District of Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures, the Asian Development Bank, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), and the People’s Republic of China. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore and his colleagues at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for work done from 1995-2000. His work with numerous universities includes being Co-Chair of the CleanTech Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, lecturing at the Haas Business School Executive Program and at Pepperdine University, and being appointed Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute. He is currently CEO of Clark Communications and a “Green Advisor” for environmental protection and sustainable development to California’s Workforce Investment Board (WIB) and the Producers Guild of America (PGA). He is also a media figure, having a reputation for being an advocate for the environment and renewable energy.

​He has published various books, including Agile Energy Systems: global lessons from the California energy crisis (2004), Qualitative Economics: toward a Science of Economics (2008) and Sustainable Communities (2009).