Parallel 4A
Ana Puyol
Ana Puyol, is the Executive Director of EcoCiencia Foundation, a long-standing national non-profit Ecuadorian scientific environmental institution. Her expertise concentrates in facilitating inter-sectorial dialogues and co-creating solutions for socio-environmental challenges, policy influencing and leading conservation initiatives related to forest governance, illegal wildlife trade, sustainable use of biodiversity, and the development of innovative bio products, which empower indigenous women in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Ana is part of the leading group of the Ecuadorian “Amazon Platform” for REDD+ and RIA (Amazon Indigenous REDD+ proposal), which brings together indigenous organization, Heads of provincial government, regional environmental authorities and ONGs.
She has been involved in several national environmental policy planning efforts, such as coordinating the Ecuadorian National Biodiversity Strategy, and the National Policy for Environmental Education and Communication. EcoCiencia is member of RAISG -The Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network -which is a consortium of civil society organizations from the Amazon countries, supported by international partners, which has been producing and analyzing various types of data using cutting edge methodologies at the regional and country levels, for independent forest monitoring information.
Rachael Petersen
Rachael Peterson is the Deputy Director for Global Forest Watch (GFW) at the World Resources Institute, where she works with civil society, governments, and local communities to increase uptake of forest monitoring technologies for management and conservation.
Prior to joining the World Resources Institute, Rachael completed a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, in which she travelled the world researching how remote indigenous communities harness digital technology to preserve their cultures. Previously, she focused on indigenous peoples’ participation in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) with the Environmental Defense Fund Amazon Basin Project, and has researched Arctic policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.
Rachael holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Public Policy from Rice University in Houston, T.X. and will begin graduate studies at MIT in the fall of 2018.
Pradeepa Bholanath
Pradeepa Bholanath is an Environmental Economist who is the Head of Planning and Development of the Guyana Forestry Commission. Her work involves leading the design and implementation of Guyana’s National Monitoring Reporting and Verification System and other areas related to forests under the Guyana Norway bilateral cooperation agreement.
Pradeepa has worked at the Guyana Forestry Commission since 2002 and has been involved in work on REDD+ since its start in Guyana in 2009. She coordinates the activities of the REDD Secretariat of the Guyana Forestry Commission and works closely with partner agencies in executing related project activities.
Pradeepa’s involvement in REDD+ now includes taking the MRVS into a second phase following 5 years of successive annual implementation, taking this to sub national level though Community MRV model, and working to shape the related aspects of governance that links to related programmatic areas such as Independent Forest Monitoring and EU FLEGT.
Maria Teresa Becerra Ramirez
María Teresa Becerra Ramirez is the Deputy Director on Ecosystems and Environmental Information at the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and environmental Studies of Colombia- IDEAM. Prior to joining IDEAM, Maria Teresa was country manager of the Earth Innovation Institute in Colombia and Head of the Environmental Area of the Andean Community. She has been also consultant at the World Bank, UNDP, UNFCCC, UNCTAD, FAO among others.
María Teresa has over 20 years of specific expertise in project management of sustainable development programs as well as other technical and policy issues related to sustainable use of biodiversity, environmental information, climate change and low-emissions development. She has practical working experience on policy advocacy, private sector engagement and applied research at the local, national, and international levels. She holds an MS in Biology from the National University of Colombia and a Biology degree from the Pontifical Xaverian University of Colombia.
Tony James
Tony James is a Wapichan leader from Southern Guyana. He is a founder of the South Rupununi District Council (SRDC), a representative body for the 14 indigenous communities in that region. He was the Toshao, or Chief, of the village of Aishalton for 12 years, and Chief of Chiefs for the region. He was also the Vice Chair of the National Toshaos Council, and a long-time member and President of the Amerindian Peoples Association.
The SRDC has a ground-breaking monitoring program that works to protect the 10,000 square-mile Wapichan territory. Its technical arm (SCPDA) was awarded the 2015 UNDP Equator Prize for Forests in recognition of Wapichan efforts to protect their traditional territory through the monitoring program. The government has awarded both SCPDA and Chief Tony James “The Golden Arrow,” one of Guyana’s most prestigious national service awards.
Martin Herold
Prof. Dr. Martin Herold is the chair for geoinformation science and remote sensing at Wageningen University. He holds a PhD from the University of California-Santa Barbara (2004) and completed a habilitation (second PhD, 2009) on a topic on operational global land cover observation and assessments. He leads the land cover team Global Observations of Forest Cover and Land Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) and coordinates the R&D component of the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI).
Martin is an expert the development and implementation of large-area, tropical land change and forest monitoring systems in the context of UNFCCC and the Sustainable Development Goals. He has published more than 150 scientific papers on this topic, enjoys supervising PhD students and supporting capacity development initiatives for moving innovative satellite and ground-based approaches into practice. The last weeks he has been very busy as lead author of the 2019 IPCC Good Practice Guidelines refinement; incl. providing improved Tier 1 estimates for tropical forest biomass and regrowth.
María José Sanz Sánchez
Prof. M.J. Sanz has worked in air pollution and climate change related issues for over twenty-five years and is acknowledged as a leading authority in climate change mitigatio thorugh land use activities, including forest and other ecosystems. She has divided his time between research and research-policy interface work at national and international level. On the academic side she has published widely in the areas of air pollution dynamics and impacts in terrestrial ecosystems, mitigation of climate change, environmental and climate change policy, GHGs estimations and accounting in the land use sector, and REDD+.
She has held Senior Officer positions at the Center for Enviroemental Estudies of the Mediterranean (CEAM), the secretariat of the UNFCCC supporting climate change negotiations from Bali to Durban, and at FAO as Program Coordinator of the UNREDD Programme until 2015. She was a lead author in 4th IPCC Assessment Reports on Climate Change, and several of the IPCC GHGs Inventory Guidelines since 2003. Since Januray 2016, She is the Sicientific Director of the Basque Centre for Climate Change, a world reconized multidiciplinary research center and think-thank.
Daniela Pogliani
Daniela Pogliani, Conservacion Amazonica-ACCA Executive Director overseas the overall strategy of the organization, including fundraising, project implementation and technology testing and implementation. With her extensive background in finance and administration, combined with over 20 years of experience in Europe and South American and a deep passion for environmental challenges, she is interested in fostering and building relationships with public and private institutions, to make conservation a more visible and understood topic. Illegal logging, deforestation for informal gold mining and coca plantations, threaten remaining intact Andean-Amazon forest cover and poses a risk for meeting deforestation commitments and REDD+ implementation.
Peru has made major strides in this arena in recent years, including the creation of key new forest-related government entities such as Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (SERFOR), the National Environmental prosecutor Office and most recently the Judicial Power. Key challenges to improve the effectiveness and transparency in the region’s forest sector are complex and multifaceted and include technical capacity for forest monitoring, rapid response to new deforestation events, gaps in government capacity, forest concession management, and lack of practical models for improving management on the ground.
Daniela and her team of experts have developed successful and replicable initiatives consolidating the Andean Amazon deforestation monitoring system known as MAAP in an independent ad accurate tool while strengthening link between near real time-deforestation data and forest governance.Since improvement of governance, particularly related to illegal deforestation, requires working at multiple scales, the team collaborates with regional and national government authorities and stakeholders to share deforestation-monitoring methodology and build capacities to improve forest governance and multi-level enforcement actions.The organization unique boots-on-the ground approach also allows for development and testing of field models for improved forestry concession management by concessionaires in Peru’s Amazon.
Brian Zutta
Brian Zutta is the coordinator of the National Forest Monitoring System of the Ministry of the Environment of Peru. Since 2014, he has been building the system to include data on deforestation, degradation, land use change and early alerts primarily for the Peruvian Amazon. This information has been included in the official 2016 National Forest Reference Emission Level and subsequent national and international reports. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and did his postdoc at NASA–JPL. He is currently working on solidifying the national monitoring system, analyzing emerging trends in forest cover loss and using machine-learning algorithms to assess deforestation risk.
Julian Fox
20 years of experience in forest assessment as a leader of multi-disciplinary teams, manager of international and national projects, researcher, teacher, and technical specialist. 7 years of experience living and working in developing countries managing international REDD+ forestry projects in Papua New Guinea and Zambia. 11 years of experience managing and coordinating technical work on forest resources monitoring in the context of REDD+ since REDD was first articulated in the Bali Action Plan of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2007 with a majority of this gained whilst living and working in developing countries.
Current position is Team Leader, National Forest Monitoring (NFM), Forestry Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). As Team Leader NFM, I coordinate global normative NFM/REDD+ work, global NFM tools (Open Foris suite, and SEPAL), and a significant portfolio of country support activities of the NFM team (active in forty-five countries). The Team supports countries on technical issues related to National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS), the development of cost effective and reliable Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) for REDD+ processes as well as SDG indicators. In terms of impact, 75% of all 38 Forest Reference (Emission) Levels submitted to the UNFCCC have received support from the FAO NFM/REDD+ team.