30 abril 2026
The Proforest Initiative appoints Jenny McInnes as new Trustee
New board member brings 20 years of experience driving strategy and delivering nature-positive impact in government and finance.
Today, nature and climate finance expert Jenny McInnes joins The Proforest Initiative’s board of Trustees. Jenny’s appointment contributes her significant leadership experience shaping strategy in policy and finance to support Proforest’s mission to deliver positive impact for people, nature and climate.
Proforest is a mission-driven organisation that includes both companies and non-profit organisations. All members of the group voluntarily sign up to a commitment to re-invest any profit to continue the work of the group to advance its shared mission. Proforest manages grant-funded programmes through its registered charities in the UK, Africa and Brazil and provides consultancy services through its companies.
With today’s appointment, The Proforest Initiative Board strengthens its sectoral expertise and draws on Jenny’s long track record delivering impact, shaping international environmental policy, and mobilising sustainable finance for emerging markets. As Group Head of Sustainability Policy & Partnerships at HSBC, she led the bank’s Net Zero Policy Framework and drove initiatives to support the clean energy and nature transition.
Previously, Jenny was a senior civil servant in the UK Government, working across international climate finance and policy development and delivery. As Deputy Director for International Climate Finance Partnerships, Jenny set up and led multi-million-pound programmes, including UK PACT and the Climate Finance Accelerator and served as the UK co-Chair to NDC Partnership.
Jenny McInnes commented:
I first worked with Proforest 20 years ago, and from the outset was hugely impressed by their pragmatism, technical credibility and ability to successfully navigate a febrile and political agenda. Sustainability commitments are being deprioritised, and yet there is an increasing realisation that supply chains and finance face systemic risk. Proforest is a natural, high-integrity and trusted partner to support companies to navigate this complex transition. The Proforest Initiative has an ever more crucial role to play in ensuring real-world impact in halting and reversing nature loss, tackling climate impacts, and supporting sustainable livelihoods. I am honoured to be able to support it.
The Proforest Initiative
The Proforest Initiative promotes transformation of agricultural commodity production by addressing systemic issues that are barriers to achieving positive social and environmental outcomes. It does this by building collaboration between supply chain companies, producers, governments, NGOs and other stakeholders by sharing innovative tools and knowledge. As members of the Proforest Group, the charity is able to leverage the group’s existing engagement with supply chain companies, as well as its global network of local expertise in producing countries. The Proforest Initiative UK manages grant-funded programmes, and projects that support other non-profit organisations and the charity’s knowledge products are always publicly available.
The Proforest Initiative's trustees help Proforest achieve the implementation of our strategic plan and ensure efficient management of the organisation. The full board now includes:
Jenny McInnes
Jenny is a nature and climate finance expert with over 20 years of experience driving international environmental policy and sustainable finance transformation. As Group Head of Sustainability Policy & Partnerships at HSBC, she led the bank’s Net Zero Policy Framework and drove cross-industry and within-HSBC initiatives on mobilising finance for emerging markets to support the clean energy transition, and mainstreaming management of nature risk and opportunity across client portfolios. Before HSBC, Jenny was a senior civil servant in the UK Government, and had roles across environment policy (Defra), policy delivery (PM Delivery Unit), and international climate finance and negotiations (DECC, BEIS). As Deputy Director for International Climate Finance Partnerships, Jenny set up and led multi-million-pound programmes including UK PACT, the Climate Finance Accelerator, and the UK-Colombian Amazon partnership. While head of the international forests team, she led the set-up of multi-country initiatives to tackle deforestation (e.g., TFA, GNU) and led the REDD+ negotiations team at COP16. Jenny currently works as a Senior Fellow with Ostara Collective and is focused on unlocking finance for collective action to support sustainable land use, nature recovery and resilience in EMDEs.
Dr Anders Lindhe
Anders has been involved with conservation and certification for more than thirty years, including four years with WWF Sweden and six years as WWF International Forest Certification Officer. He has been part of numerous national and international FSC processes and working groups, helped to create and develop the High Conservation Value (HCV) concept, and coordinated the FSC Plantations Review. He helped Proforest facilitate RTRS standard-setting process and was deeply engaged in RSPO’s Biodiversity and HCV WG and Compensation Task Force. Having been Technical Manager for the HCV Network for ten years, he retired in 2022. He currently supports audits of Swedish FSC certificates on a part-time basis. Anders has a PhD in conservation biology (Uppsala), and degree in chemistry and botany (Stockholm).
Dr Chris Elliott
Dr Chris Elliott is an Adjunct Professor in the faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia. He was the first Executive Director of the Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA) and prior to joining the Alliance worked for WWF in a variety of capacities and regions over twenty years, starting as China Program Coordinator and ending as Executive Director, Conservation, at WWF International. Before that, he was employed by The World Bank and by the Bank of Boston. He began his professional career by working for several years in organic agriculture. Chris has been closely involved in major forest conservation initiatives in the Congo Basin and the Amazon and led the development of a global partnership between WWF and IKEA. He worked on the establishment of the Forest Stewardship Council and was the organisation’s first Board Chair. His education is in plant sciences, forestry, forest policy and ecosystem management at the universities of London, Yale and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). His doctoral dissertation was on forest certification as a policy instrument.
