Jeff Conant, Senior International Forests Program Manager, Friends of the Earth

Jeff Conant directs Friends of the Earth’s international forests program. The program’s primary campaign, “Landgrabs, Forests and Finance” pressures institutional investors and consumer brands to address the material risks associated with rainforest destruction.

Recent successes include supporting CalPERS to expand its ESG policies to recognize deforestation, biodiversity, and land rights as material investment risks, and pressuring several multinational consumer brands to cancel contracts with abusive palm oil suppliers in Guatemala.

Jeff has worked on issues of international development justice for two decades, including advocacy for climate justice at the U.N. and other global arenas. With International Accountability Project he co-authored A Community Guide to the Environmental and Social Safeguards of the Asian Development Bank; and with Hesperian Health Guides he co-authored A Community Guide to Environmental Health, a grassroots manual published in over a dozen languages. Jeff is also the author of A Poetics of Resistance, about Mexico’s Zapatista movement, and translator of Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine.

He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from Boston University and a Master’s from New College of California.