Head of Forestry
I am Head of Forestry for ‘ForestRe’, the brand name for forest underwriting unit within our host underwriting agency, that is based in the City of London. We insure forests and fruit trees on behalf of certain Syndicates at Lloyd’s (A- AM Best) and several other capacity providers offering traditional indemnity insurances and appropriate parametric products. Experienced in assessing crop and forest risk over 25 years, the unit price risk, model worst case scenarios and design new insurance products and procedures for all tree-types including carbon and other ecosystem services.
Believing that forestry was the only at-scale solution to slowing climate change, our mission has always been to de-risk investment into all forms of forestry made by individuals, companies, institutions and governments, including community reforestation schemes. In my early career I was in agricultural extension & training among peoples of the Pacific islands, Central Africa and in the UK.
Our team have a wealth of experience of natural hazard impacts on many types of forestry. Technical skill areas include project risk analysis, technical support to investors and insurers, and design of agricultural and forestry insurance products world-wide. I, with my team have developed many national and provincial crop and forestry insurance schemes and rubber crop portfolio protection. Crop schemes include a national rice crop in Malaysia, crop insurance programmes in Syria, Sudan and forest provincial firefighting cost protection in Alberta Canada. We present at international forestry and sustainable development conferences talking about climate impacts on forestry, returns to forest investments and pricing climate risk.
I have an MSc in Agricultural Extension and Rural Development with a BSc in Agriculture and Tropical Crops from Reading University.