John Sauven

John Sauven has been Executive Director of Greenpeace UK since September 2007. Before that he was the director responsible for Greenpeace communications and working on solutions with businesses. With a background in forests he was instrumental in getting protection for the Great Bear temperate rainforest on the west coast of Canada. It was an epic battle, mostly fought in the market place between logging companies, timber traders and their retail customers in Europe and North America. It also involved pushing the industry as a whole to accept Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified products that guaranteed legal and sustainable products, now widely recognised in both the timber and paper sectors as the mark of sustainability.

It was from the lessons learnt in the Great Bear campaign that similar tactics were used elsewhere including in Indonesia, the Congo in central Africa and the Amazon. John Sauven co-ordinated the international campaign to secure a moratoria on further destruction of the Amazon by soya producers. It involved eventually bringing together a huge alliance of US and European mulitinationals along with Brazilian counterparts involved in the soya producing, commodity trading and food retailing sectors. It was one of Greenpeace's most successful campaigns to protect large areas of the world's last intact rainforests providing both climate and biodiversity protection.