FT Fellows

A Forest Trends Fellow is an honorary position designed to bring added expertise and experience to our team. This position is offered to a very small number of internationally recognized leaders in the field of forestry whose own interests overlap and support the Forest Trends mission and program. The purpose of this position is to promote long-term collaboration that is mutually beneficial reflecting our collective interests.

John P. Begley is President and Chief Executive Officer of Port Townsend Paper Corporation, since December 1997. Port Townsend Paper Corp. is a producer of unbleached natural kraft pulp and paper at its mill in Port Townsend, Washington, and the company also manufactures high quality paper products at converting operations at the mill and in Portland, Oregon. Some of these paper products include Grocery Bags and Sacks, ReadyHandle™ handle sacks, Merchandise Bags, Food Service Bags (bread bags, bottle bags, prescription bags and more) and even Gift Wrap. The mill was built in 1927, and for most of its history was operated by Crown Zellerbach. It was acquired in 1983 by Haindl Papier of Germany and sold in late 1997 to a local group headed by Northwest Capital Appreciation, Inc., of Seattle, and company management. John has spent virtually his entire professional career in the papermaking business. He was associated with Weyerhaeuser Company for nearly 25 years, moving all the way up from a Sales Trainee to General Manager for the Western Region and Pacific Rim of Weyerhaeuser Paper Company. He was Strategic Planning Director for Weyerhaeuser just prior to joining Port Townsend Paper. In addition to a distinguished career, John holds an MBA degree and has completed a number of post-graduate specialty courses, programs and seminars. He is a civic-minded executive who has served many charitable, church, business and community groups as well as the Boy Scouts of America and others. John and his family now live in the Port Townsend area and are active in the community. He served in the U.S. Army as a Pathfinder, reaching the rank of Sergeant, and spent nearly a year in Vietnam, earning the Combat Infantryman's Badge, Bronze Star with V and other decorations.

Arnoldo Contreras-Hermosilla is a Chilean forest economist. His work focuses on economic policy analysis and governance issues in the forest sector of developing countries. He is a former Senior Natural Resources Economist at the World Bank in Washington, and the Principal Economist at the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development in Geneva In the past, he also held senior positions at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome and the United Nations Development Programme in Geneva. Dr. Contreras-Hermosilla's experience spans a number of countries of Latin America and Asia as well as analytical work on global governance issues. His most recent areas of research include the study of government policies to combat illegal activities, corruption and crime in the forest sector, decentralization, and emerging innovative policy approaches to improving governance in the forest sector. He holds a PhD degree in forest economics and a MSc. Forestry, both from the University of Minnesota and Forest Engineering and MSc degrees in Agricultural Economics from the University of Chile .

Tod Sedgwick is president of Red Hills Lumber Co. of Thomasville, Ga., where he mills his own FSC-certified longleaf pine into heart pine flooring. He is also president of Sedgwick Publsihing Co., which publishes specialty newsletters on a variety of subjects. He launched and built up Pasha Publications, which published newsletters in the energy field, which he sold to the Financial Times in 1998. He then started up Io Energy LLC, which he sold to SNL Financial of Charlottesville in 2004. He is a consultant to SNL Financial. A graduate of Harvard College, Sedgwick serves on the boards of the Civil War Preservation Trust, Wetlands America Trust (an affiliate of Ducks Unlimited), the Folger Shakespeare Library, College Year in Athens, and the Gennadius Library of Athens. He also serves on the boards of Atlantic Information Services and Washington Business Information Inc. He is also a member of the Chief Executive Organization and World Presidents Organization.

John Spears, now retired, graduated from the universities of Wales, Oxford and British Columbia. He has spent most of his life working on tropical forest conservation and related environmental problems . Appointed as Conservator of Forests in Kenya in the early 1950's he later became Executive Director of the East Africa Forest Industrial Development Corporation . He joined the World Bank in 1966, initially as its Senior Forest Adviser and then as a Policy Adviser to its Environmental Department. In the early 1980's he joined the Shell International Company Non-Traditional Business Division . He was a Science Adviser to the CGIAR during a period of expansion that lead to incorporation of CIFOR and ICRAF into the CG system. Since retirement he has acted as Secretary General of the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development , Coordinator of the World Bank/ WWF Alliance and as an independent adviser and consultant to WWF, IUCN, CIFOR, UNEP, Transparency International and most recently to Forest Trends.

Changjin Sun is Director of the Center of Ecological and Environmental Economics Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, leading and managing the Center's programs on strategic policy work in the broad field of environment, the promotion of environmentally friendly business in China and project consulting in environmental protection and resource management. Major current Center research projects cover subject topics such as forest certification, natural forest protection, trade and environment, timber market studies, township and village enterprises development in upland Yunnan, water conservation, the root causes of biodiversity loss, and conservation financing. He has a Ph. D. in economics (fields of concentration: development economics, and natural resource and environmental economics), from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA in 1996, a M.S. in resources economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA in 1994, a M.S. in forest economics and management, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China in 1986 and a B.S. in silviculture, South-central Forestry College, Hunan, China in 1982. He served as Interim Country Representative, WorldWide Fund for Nature (WWF)-China Programme, Beijing, April 1, 1998-Jan. 1999. Leading and supervising all aspects of WWF's presence in China. Previous to that he served as Project Officer and Coordinator of the World Bank-WWF Alliance on Forestry and Sustainable Forest Use, WWF-China Programme,. He managed all the forestry-related projects at WWF-China Programme and a number of wetland and marine conservation projects.

Wooter Veening, out of his IUCN-Netherlands Office in Amsterdam and since 2002 also out of his Institute for Environmental Security in The Hague Wouter Veening has been part of international environmental dialogue with the World Bank, the regional development banks, and the European Union. Since 1998 he heads the Guiana Shield Initiative which has as central objective to base the sustainable development of the Guiana Shield ecoregion (Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana, Venezuela South and East of the Orinoco, Colombia West of the Orinoco and the Northern parts of the Brazilian states Amazônas, Roraima, Pará and Amapá) primarily upon payments for ecosystem services (www.guianashield.org) . Currently he is also involved to help prevent forest fires in Indonesia, a major threat to local, regional and global environmental security. By offering payments for the ecosystem services of intact forests (www.envirosecurity.org) he has developed the programme "The Netherlands and the World Ecology," showing the tremendous footprint of a small, but wealthy, country on the forest and wetland ecosystems elsewhere in the world (www.iucn.nl ). He is part of the Eco-Insurance programme which aims to mobilise funds to safeguard the major global life-support systems (www.eco-insurance.net)