Ben Vickers

Ben Vickers (MSc Forestry, Oxford) joined the Policy and Standards Committee in 2024 as the member from Social Chamber (North).  After studying forestry at Aberdeen and Oxford, he moved to Asia in 1997 and lived in Nepal, Vietnam, India and Thailand, working throughout Asia, the Pacific, and sub-Saharan Africa in forestry and rural development. Since 2007 he has focused on integrating the forest sector into national climate change mitigation and adaptation policies and strategies in developing countries through the UNFCCC’s REDD+ mechanism. From 2012 he coordinated the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on forestry and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region, including through the UN-REDD Programme, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility of the World Bank, and Green Climate Fund (GCF) projcts. He facilitated FAO's first service contract with FSC's Asia Regional Office as part of a project to address forest crime in the Mekong basin. In 2021 he joined the GCF Secretariat in Korea as Senior Specialist in Land Use, Forests and Ecosystems. An individual member of FSC since 2005, he served on FSC's first Forest Carbon Working Group and the Principles and Criteria Working Group that brought the P&C V5.0 to the membership in 2012.