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Willem Ferwerda
Executive Fellow
Climate Change and Business
Rotterdam School of Management (RSM)
Erasmus University Rotterdam

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Ferwerda is executive fellow business and ecosystems at Rotterdam School of Management-Erasmus University. He is involved as an advisor or board member with various international organizations in the field of nature, biodiversity, agriculture and sustainability, such as the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management, 1T.org, Charles Darwin Foundation among others.

From 2000-2012 Ferwerda was director of IUCN NL, the Dutch members office IUCN. There he was, among other things, leading large ecosystem grants programs, and initiator of Leaders for Nature, an international network of CEOs and prominent people from the business community addressing biodiversity conservation – the first in its kind and an important vehicle to address urgent non-familiar issues such as biodiversity in the board room. It led to several agreements and policy changes with industrial networks. Between 1995 and 2000 he headed the Tropical Rainforest Grants Program of IUCN NL that supported hundreds local conservation and restoration projects in more than 40 countries. In 2009 Ferwerda met the Chinese-American filmmaker John D. Liu and since then they work together. In 2012, Ferwerda left IUCN NL for a sabbatical in which he developed the 4 Returns Framework from Landscape Restoration.

Ferwerda studied biology, tropical agriculture and environmental science at the Free University and University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Colombia. He is specialized in the interaction between (tropical) ecosystems, landuse, agriculture, and system change management. He worked in Africa, Latin America and Europe.

In 2014 Ferwerda introduced the 4 Returns in the  In 2016, Ferwerda was awarded first place in the Sustainable 100, the list of Dutch people with the most influence on the environment and sustainability. In 2019 he received the Dutch sustainable landscape award.

Featured in the media

  • Redesigning economics based on ecology

    Willem Ferwerda, Executive Fellow at the Rotterdam School of Management and special advisor to the IUCN, explains why the restoration of damaged ecosystems is an economic imperative.