Meet the speakers of our upcoming event

Olaf Westermann is a Senior Technical Advisor on Climate Change and Land Restoration at Catholic Relief Services (CRS), where he supports CRS’s global agriculture and livelihoods programming. He also co-led the Strategic Change Platform for Scaling Livelihood and Landscape Restoration. Outside of CRS, Olaf served for several years as a Director on the Board of the Global EverGreening Alliance and continues to contribute as a member of its Strategic Advisory Committee. He also sits on the Steering Committees for Regreening Africa and Restore Africa respectively, the latter being the world’s largest carbon-funded smallholder restoration program. Prior to joining CRS, Olaf worked with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in Denmark, where he coordinated the development of the Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) 101 web-based learning platform. In Denmark he also held a position as Director at the Board of the Danish NGO Forests of the World. From 2008 to 2014, he served as a Senior Advisor on Protected Areas Management and Climate Change for the Danish Development Agency (DANIDA) in Bolivia. Before that, he was a researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia and the Danish Institute of International Studies, focusing on the social and organizational dimensions of water and watershed management, including collective action and conflict, participatory monitoring and evaluation, and stakeholder and gender analysis. Dr. Westermann holds a Ph.D. in Social Science, specializing in pro-poor payment for environmental services schemes.