Andrea Johnson

Andrea is a consultant to foundations, non-profits, and businesses on issues related to tropical forests: their governance, their destruction, their restoration. She currently supports grantmaking at the Climate and Land Use Alliance, with a focus on cleaning up supply chains that contribute to deforestation and advocating to secure indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights over their territories. She also oversees management of The Forestland Group's timber properties in Costa Rica and takes on other projects as time allows. In her spare time, Andrea is restoring 12 hectares of cattle pasture on the Osa Peninsula to native forest and permacultural systems. She serves on the board of the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program and Osa Birds: Research and Conservation.

Andrea graduated from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 2005 with a Master's in Environmental Science. After previous work on orangutans in Indonesia and macaw ecology in Peru, she shifted focus at Yale towards the social, financial, and political aspects of tropical conservation, conducting thesis work on Peru's Camisea Natural Gas Pipeline controversy and organizing on campus for more transparent endowment investment policies. After a brief stint in 2006 with the Native Species Reforestation Project (PRORENA) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, Andrea returned stateside to work with the Environmental Investigation Agency, an NGO that uses undercover investigation and advocacy to document and expose international environmental crimes. Between 2006 and 2012, Andrea led the rapid growth of EIA's forest campaign, achieving passage of the 2008 Amendments to the US Lacey Act, conducting investigations of illegal timber trade and corruption in Peru, Madagascar and Russia, and advocating for change in national and global climate change policies. In 2012, Andrea moved to Costa Rica, where she worked for several years at CATIE, Central America's pre-eminent institution for research and training in agriculture and forestry, on a project to support and remove obstacles for community forestry and trade in wood products from small businesses in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. She has continued to serve as a senior advisor to EIA, focused on work to strengthen community forest monitoring initiatives and expose forest crimes in Latin America and elsewhere.