Christopher Philipson

Christopher is a forest ecologist with over 15 years of experience managing forestry and ecological projects predominantly in Southeast Asia but also in Europe. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and a PhD from the University of Zürich in Switzerland. For his PhD he studied the growth rates of tropical tree seedlings, with particular attention native species planted within restoration projects in Borneo. He continued this work during his postdoc, managing The Sabah Biodiversity experiment studying the effect of tree diversity for restoration. He has worked on projects in European forests studying the effect of tree diversity both on tree growth and multiple ecosystem services, and also how changes in climate (such as soil warming and increased CO2) affect tree growth in the alps. For the past six years he was a senior scientist at the ETH in Zürich, where he still leads the FORESTeR project, in Sabah, Malaysia, examining how restoration affects diversity and ecosystem services. He now works with the tropical forest protection developer Permian Global where he manages forest ecology and remote sensing to estimate carbon stocks and recovery in large-scale tropical forest protection and restoration projects.