Wouter Veening

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) "


 * Fellow, Forest Trends