Members of the Panel:

According to the Agreement, IUCN has the complete freedom and authority to appoint, convene and manage the Panel, to ensure the independence of the Panel and the integrity of its work and outputs.

The Panel will review the existing conservation tools used by Holcim, such as the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment and Quarry Rehabilitation Recommendations, advise on how these might be improved, recommend or design additional tools as might be necessary, and provide independent input on biodiversity conservation policy for the Group.

Composition of the Panel

Dr Christoph Imboden (Chairman)

Christoph is an ecologist and biodiversity conservation expert who has been working internationally for the past 30 years and been closely associated with IUCN, especially its Species Survival Commission, since the early 1980s. After completing his PhD on an ornithological topic in Switzerland he moved to New Zealand under a postgraduate scholarship where his initial interest in academic ecological research was soon diverted towards the enormous practical conservation problems faced by a country that had undergone rapid human colonisation and flooding by alien species. After these formative years he became director (and first employee) of an international bird conservation federation which, under his 16-year stewardship, was transformed into BirdLife International.

For the past 12 years Christoph has been working as an independent Consultant in Europe, Africa and Asia. A multitude of short and long assignments for national and international NGOs, governments, international agencies and the business sector, on a wide variety of topics, reflect his broad interest and experiences – ranging from strategic planning to programme evaluation, from institutional management to the development and implementation of conservation projects on the ground, from biodiversity conservation to management of protected areas and conservation education, from general policies on corporate social responsibility to specific corporate sustainability strategies. As an on-going activity he has been advising a large consumer goods company for the past ten years on CRS issues, successfully convincing them to invest significantly in a series of external environmental programmes benefiting global biodiversity conservation. While a lot of his work today of strategic and advisory nature, he always maintained in his portfolio a direct involvement in some practical field projects (development, planning, supervision), such as, at the moment, conservation education programmes in Austria, India and China. 

Daniel Gross

Daniel was born in 1942 in New York City and raised in Atlanta Georgia where he attended public schools. He was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and earned a PhD in anthropology (1970) at Columbia University in New York. For nearly 20 years, he was Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, Visiting Professor at the University of Brasília, and Program Officer at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Most of his research and writing focuses on human adaptation, diet and nutrition among rural producers and indigenous peoples of Brazil. 

Daniel joined the World Bank in 1989 and worked primarily on investment projects. His project work covers such themes as Environmental Institution Strengthening, Community Forestry, Plantation Forestry, Biodiversity Conservation, Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, Irrigation, Hydropower and Water Storage, Involuntary Resettlement, Slum Upgrading, Public Sanitation, Urban and Rural Transport. Gross has worked in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Paraguay, Cape Verde, Mozambique, India and Maldives. He speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish and some French. Upon retiring from the Bank in 2004, he held the position of Lead Anthropologist.

Daniel is now an independent consultant.

Peter-John Meynell

Peter-John comes from the UK. He is currently based in Vientiane, Laos, working as an independent environmental consultant. With a first degree in biochemistry from Oxford University, he has an MSc in Applied Hydrobiology (University of London), and in Agricultural Extension (Reading University). He has worked in a variety of environmental and natural resource fields in southern and central Africa, South and South-east Asia and China, covering water pollution, wetlands and fisheries, biogas, and environmental impact assessments. 

Peter-John worked for four years with IUCN in Pakistan, running a mangrove and coastal zone management project between 1991 and 1994, and then returned to the UK working first with Cobham Resource Consultants and then Scott Wilson and living in Edinburgh. Whilst with them he was team leader for a several key SEA/EIAs – SEA of tourism developments around Victoria Falls (Zambia and Zimbabwe) and SEA of the veterinary fences around the Okavango Delta, Botswana. In 2003, he rejoined IUCN Asia heading up the Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Programme, working with Mekong River Commission and UNDP in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam until March 2007.

Afterwards, he remained in Vientiane and continues to carry out EIAs of hydropower dams in Laos. He has produced a number of guidelines with IUCN – the OECD wetland guidelines, Case studies on ecosystem management, and environmental guidelines for extractive industries in drylands.

David Richards

David was born in 1953 and grew up in the east of England. He trained as an economic geologist at Imperial College in London and subsequently worked for 17 years as a geologist in copper, tin and gold mines in Cornwall (UK), Saudi Arabia and Portugal. In 1990 he began studying for a postgraduate research degree in Environmental Geochemistry as an external student of the University of Liverpool (UK). His thesis was on the biogeochemistry of mercury in a river basin in Portugal and he completed the MPhil in 1995.

In 1992 David was transferred to the Environmental Affairs Unit of Rio Tinto, and he continued this work, latterly in the corporate HSE department, until the end of 2007. His main areas of responsibility were the development of corporate environmental policies (notably the Biodiversity Strategy, Acid Rock Drainage risk review protocols, and Social and Environmental Impact Assessment Guidelines), development of relationships with external organizations and programmes (notably partnerships with conservation NGOs, the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development project, the ICMM-IUCN Dialogue, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Business and Biodiversity Offset Programme), and strategic environmental risk reviews of operating sites and investment projects in 12 countries. He speaks Portuguese and some French.

He has recently begun working as an independent environmental adviser.  

Marc Stalmans

Marc was born and grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He left in 1974 at the age of 15 to complete high school in Belgium. He studied Agricultural Engineering, specializing in Forestry & Limnology. This was followed by a study in Tropical Animal Production & Health. 

Marc started working in 1984 as research officer in a Protected Area in South Africa and completed a MSc in Botany. In 1990 he moved to the adjoining province where he became responsible for the ecological section of the local Parks Board. He completed a PhD in landscape ecology on the relationships between vegetation, fire and wild ungulates in the Barberton Mountainland. He has been consulting as an independent ecologist since 2001.

He has experience of conservation research, planning, management and development in the public, parastatal and private sector. He has been involved in projects in African countries (Angola, Cameroon, Gabon, Moçambique, Morocco, South Africa, Togo, Zambia & Zimbabwe), the Middle East (UAE & Qatar) and the Far East (China). These projects include conservation and management planning for national parks and other protected areas, Transfrontier Conservation planning, eco-tourism development plans (focusing on zonation and site selection), wildlife censuses, monitoring, fire management, landscape and vegetation mapping. One of his on-going responsibilities is as Environmental Control Officer liaising between the Kruger National Park and a private tourism operator on a 15,000ha concession in the Park (regular environmental audits and EMP’s for new developments and activities). Recently, he has been very involved in the theoretical and practical development of biodiversity offsets in the Business & Biodiversity Offset Program.

Marc speaks English, French, Dutch and Afrikaans and has limited knowledge of Portuguese and German. He is based in South Africa.