Dr Renaat Van Rompaey holds an MSc in tropical Forestry from Ghent University, Belgium and a PhD in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His thesis was about : Forests of West Africa: a spatial gradient analysis. He has been teaching at Brussels, Montpellier and Eberswalde (Berlin) Universities.
He has 26 years professional experience in the environment sector (esp. nature protection and climate change), focusing on sustainable - and ecosystem-based natural resource management. In addition he has more than 10 year experience in all phases of programme formulation, evaluation, monitoring, implementation and reporting – for multiple donors in – in over 34 developing/ transitional countries, e.g. Papua New Guinea and Fiji. He has 14 publications in international peer-reviewed journals in the topic of international conservation issues, climate change and forestry. He is fluent in English and French.