Patrick Worms, a Cambridge-educated molecular geneticist, serves as the Treasurer of IUAF, the International Union of Agroforestry. In his day job, he represents CIFOR-ICRAF, the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry, to policymakers, donors and corporate partners in Brussels and elsewhere in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Patrick has been active at the science-policy interface since the late 1980s, with a start teaching biology in the Hindu Kush. As a young European official, he pioneered new ways of using communications to deal with the environmental legacy of communism across the former Soviet Union before leaving for the private sector and engaging with the disastrous environmental legacy of China’s Great Leap Forward. There, he was involved in an effort that became the first large-scale private-sector investment in tree planting for watershed remediation in that country. His career has been varied; amongst the highlights were a role helping ESA, the European Space Agency, develop its Vision for Human Spaceflight; helping the Republic of Georgia defend itself against Russian aggression in 2008; and combating domestic violence in Ukraine. Since 2011, he has ICRAF’s Senior Science Policy Advisor.
Patrick’s interests sit at the nexus of land restoration and human security. Research shows that marrying traditional and advanced agricultural knowledge is the most promising pathway to rural prosperity, a giant help to mitigate our impact on biodiversity and the atmosphere and, tantalizingly, peace in a warming world.
It is striking that almost everywhere on the planet, these advanced traditional management systems included trees, planted or kept or regenerated in landscapes both arable and pastoral. What is really exciting is that science is now elucidating the many marvellous reasons why this form of agriculture, called agroforestry, is the future of farming and forestry.
Patrick is President of EURAF, the European Agroforestry Federation; a member of the Steering Committee of International Land Lives Peace, which works at the interface between land degradation and conflicts; a Senior Fellow of the Global Evergreening Alliance; and a member of several advisory boards.