Paul Chatterton

Paul is the founder and lead of the Landscape Finance Lab. During an extensive career with WWF, Paul has catalysed results including the first jurisdictional scale forest and climate (REDD+) programs on two continents, Europe’s longest river protected area and the largest rainforest reserve in the Pacific.

Paul is a co-author of the Little Sustainable Landscape Book and co-initiator of Landmapp, a mobile app to provide affordable land tenure to rural communities.

Deesha Chandra

Expertise: Community Engagement; Open Innovation; Digital Collaboration; Content Curation; Project Management; Law.

Deesha is passionate about helping people and diverse sectors collaborate, increasing community engagement and igniting social innovation. She has over 10 years experience in a multi-sector environment, developing and managing communities.

Deesha brings with her experience in program design for start ups and managed the Fellowship for Longer Lives programme (an acceleration program for early stage start-ups focusing on impacting the Ageing population in the UK), at Impact Hub King’s Cross.  She has recently published a free and living resource (crowdsourcing4impact.org) for charities and non-profits who want to use crowdsourcing to engage and innovate with their communities and partners.

LFL Role
Deesha oversees the Lab’s Learning portfolio which includes co-designing learning experiences with partners, curating content, guiding members through the Lab’s incubation platform and leading on the Learning strategy.

Martin Burian

Expertise: Design/modeling of energy policies; Climate change; Low Carbon technologies; Carbon mitigation; GHG sector 

Being an economist by training, Martin Burian has been engaged in energy and climate-change issues since 2004. He has in-depth knowledge of the design and modeling of energy / climate policies. Martin offers outstanding conceptual capacities and quantitative skills combined with a broad technical understanding of various low-carbon technologies.

Throughout his career, Martin has advised and supported governments in their low carbon development efforts by designing carbon mitigation activities. He advised the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation by designing marginal abatement cost functions for key GHG sectors. Additionally, he advised on the design of emission trading schemes and developed levelized electricity costs models for various technologies. On behalf of the German Ministry for the Environment, he evaluated renewable energy potential, investment needs, and the mitigation potential of several renewable energy technologies for 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2013, Burian has been supporting the DRC government in designing its FCPF program, including an investment and financing plan.

LFL Role
Martin works on identifying and designing carbon strategies within Landscape programmes.

Erik Dexperts-Lestapis

Expertise: Corporate finance, Sales operations, Supply chain operations and Project management

Erik has spent almost two decades in the corporate world and the outdoor industry where he developed a wide experience in operations management including finance, sales, supply chain and project. Passionate surfer and photographer, he landed in Malaysia 3 years ago with his wife and the strong desire to give their two boys another point of view on the world. It was an opportunity to dive into entrepreneurship and test his business acumen with the co-creation of a start-up in the audio identity area. The LAB is for him a unique opportunity to get involved in something that matters and support a true innovative initiative that will definitely help make a difference for the future.

LFL Role
Erik will share his background to help the Lab scale up operations and build efficient systems & processes to support the team.

Sarah Forrester-Wilson

Sarah Forrester-Wilson. UK/Brazil

Sarah is an experienced process designer, facilitator and Sustainability Consultant. She has worked with systems change and complexity issues for over nine years in a widely international setting. She has a passion for systemic transformation that works on all levels of the I, we and it, and is a strong advocate for interventions that address not only the cognitive realm, but also that of the somatic and the spiritual. She has worked as an independent consultant, providing contextually crafted support for organisations working in both social and environmental justice and has a particular interest when working with groups where both the social and the environmental intersect. She is a passionate facilitator and a strong believer for co-creative, participatory methods that build capacity amongst the participants. Sarah has been working in Lab design for the past five years and deeply believes in the Landscape Lab approach as a way of creating long-term ecological and social resilience across the whole system. Sarah is from the UK living in Bahia, Brazil with her partner.

Dr. Shane Mc Guiness

Dr Mc Guinness is an experienced conservation biologist with a broad diversity of sectoral expertise and knowledge. He received an MSc in Biodiversity and Conservation and PhD in Conservation Biology from Trinity College Dublin and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, London. Shane’s conservation experience has focussed on resolving human-wildlife conflict issues globally, whether human-gorilla conflict in Rwanda, tourism pressures in the Pyrenees, transport infrastructure in Ireland or wind energy and endangered bird ecologies. Shane has also worked on the policy and advocacy of conservation and has conducted an assessment of the policies and institutions involved in biodiversity finance for Ireland, while continuing to develop novel sources of finance to fill the biodiversity funding gap.

Beyond this, his career has spanned academic, NGO and public engagement work prior to his current position in University College Dublin. He has extensive experience in mixed methods research, group facilitation, geographical information systems and qualitative analysis. Shane is highly experienced in science education and public engagement, having coordinated a national science education programme from NUI Galway, developed education programmes for Dublin Zoo and led conservation outreach and education expeditions to the Middle East and Africa. Shane is also the Development Officer for the Community Wetlands Forum, an umbrella body established to represent the interests of communities with a stake in the wetlands of Ireland.

Shane and the Lab are working together to explore opportunities for peatlands finance in Ireland.

Florian Vernaz

Expertise: Nature based solutions, Responsible Sourcing, Landscape planning, Business Incubation, Carbon Finance, Stakeholder engagement

Florian brings 15 years experience in responsible investment and sustainable landscape planning.

Before joining the Lab, Florian worked with leading environmental organizations and consultancies, such as the Global Green Growth Institute and Daemeter, to facilitate green investment at landscape level.

Florian notably facilitated the development of the Environmental and Social Action Plan for the first Green Landscape Bond in Southeast Asia.  He is passionate about rural development in eastern Indonesia and has assisted numerous social enterprises to build equitable market linkages for local communities, Sulawesi, Maluku, and Papua.

Florian graduated from the Copenhagen Business School in 2005, with a Masters Degree in Development Economics. He was a member the Danish University Consortium for Environment and Development.

LFL Role

At the Lab, Florian brings his expertise in landscape planning, responsible sourcing and business incubation to support landscape teams explore private sector engagement and sustainable sourcing opportunities. His role is to facilitate the integration of green investment into long-term landscape planning.

Aditi Chawla

Expertise: Research, Innovation sourcing, Startups, Program Management

Aditi combines over 9 years of research and consulting experience on a range of subjects, including themes such as WASH, environment, sanitation, youth, and sustainable environmental solutions. She specialises in programmes that are based on innovative solutions for low-income markets.

LFL Role

At the lab, Aditi leads and supports operations, landscape projects and programmes.

Sabrina Russo

Expertise: Communications, storytelling, graphic design, PR, political science

Originally from a politics and public relations background, Sabrina has over 15 years’ experience helping individuals and organisations of all sizes to communicate simply, effectively and beautifully.

She holds an MA in Politics from Edinburgh University, MSc Political Communications from the London School of Economics (LSE) and Diploma in Graphic Design from the London College of Communication.

Sabrina loves painting, printmaking and growing her own food (organic and peat-free!)

LFL Role
At the Lab Sabrina sits within the Learning team and leads on all Lab communications and design.