Proforest Initiative UK

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 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 organization’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. 

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 (eg. 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.