Christopher Upton

Christopher has been involved in climate action since the mid-1990s when he issued the world’s first carbon-offset certificate to the government of Costa Rica, funded by the World Bank in 1997. This was included in the climate change conference in Kyoto, highlighting the positive roles that forestry and agriculture can play in mitigating climate change.
Christopher has an MA in Agricultural and Forest Sciences form the University of Oxford and a Masters degree in Agricultural Economics.
Since the 1980s he has been involved in a range of agro-forestry research programmes, the financing of farming systems in East Africa, and community tropical forest management in Fiji. In the 1990s he began working in tropical forestry and forest certification, where together with WWF he created the Forest Stewardship Council. Christopher has co-authored and published the Forest Certification Handbook. He has completed numerous assignments on forest taxation and management for the World Bank, IMF. He is currently most involved in farming systems in England, Switzerland, France and Ireland.