Member Scope 4, Fund-raising and finance for environmental assets
Mr. Gondolini is an experienced agro-environmentalist with twenty years working experience, managing international projects in Africa, Europe and Latin America. His areas of expertise include sustainable forest management, sustainable agriculture, environmental conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, monitoring, reporting and evaluation, and humanitarian assistance. He has been instrumental in fostering climate smart agriculture worldwide and he has been involved in a number of REDD+ initiatives in agriculture. Mr. Gondolini is competent in capacity-building, technical assistance and project management, working with food value chains of tropical crops, promoting the adoption of social and environmental practices including mitigation and adaptation, payment of environmental services, tropical landscape management, food security and rural livelihoods. He is lead auditor on forest management and forest and agriculture carbon projects (validation/verification). Mr. Gondolini has worked with a number of stakeholders and participates in the main thematic platforms on food chain sustainability, climate-smart agriculture and market-based conservation. He is knowledgeable on policy and practices changes, humanitarian advocacy, strategic and participatory planning and context analysis. He works with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as senior consultant on climate-smart agriculture and to promote the sustainable production and trade of tropical commodities. Before joining the FAO, Gianluca worked six years with the Rainforest Alliance, an environmental non-profit organization, as Africa Regional Manager for the Sustainable Forestry programme and successively as Regional Manager for the Latin America Sustainable Agriculture programme. In that role, he developed the programme for climate-smart production in association with the voluntary certification standards such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Sustainable Agriculture Network, the Verified Carbon Standard and GHG protocol. Prior to this, Gianluca worked for 13 years with a number of International NGOs such as Oxfam GB in sustainable agriculture and rural development programs in Africa and Latin America. Gianluca has an educational background in tropical agro-forestry and food processing and a Master of Sciences in Environmental Management from the Imperial College and SOAS, University of London. He is fluent in five languages (Italian as mother tongue, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese).