Aida Greenbury has more than 20 years of experience in sustainability and forestry management and for 13 years has worked as Managing Director / Chief Sustainability Officer at Asia Pulp & Paper Group, one of the largest forestry, pulp & paper companies worldwide. She has led the global company’s efforts to shift to a new, responsible business model based on zero-deforestation.
Aida has been a prominent contributor and thought-leader to national and global debates about sustainability, landscape approach, forestry management, community engagement, responsible business, climate finance, trade and the future direction of Indonesia’s economy as it seeks to move up the value chain and reduce its dependency on natural resources.
Aida was the Co-Chair and now is the Adviser of the High Carbon Stock Approach Steering Group. In May 2017 this group published a new toolkit which provides a common methodology for practitioners to roll out a wider no-deforestation approach. She also is Chair of the Private Sector Roundtable of the Asia Pacific Rainforest Partnership, which was established by then Minister of Environment for Australia at the COP21 in Paris in 2015 to spearhead public-private cooperation to save rainforests in the Asia Pacific region.
She founded Belantara Foundation, a non-profit that works with public and private sources of funding to restore and protect forest landscapes.
She is a regular commentator in international media and at events such as the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, addressing issues such as the importance of openness and trade to safeguarding the economic and environmental gains made by Southeast Asian economies and the need for standards and mechanisms for environmental protection and carbon reduction to be embedded into the global financial system.
In 2017 Aida became a member of the Forest Stewardship Council, a global not-for-profit organization that sets the standards for responsibly managed forests. After years of work on jurisdictional approaches on climate change issues in Indonesia, Aida now serves as the Climate Change Envoy for the Indonesian province of South Sumatra. She was also granted a position on Mongabay’s advisory board, representing a global non-profit environmental reporting platform.
Aida has been appointed the role of Senior Expert consultant to the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) in December 2017.