Michael Jenkins is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Forest Trends. For more than a decade, Michael has worked as a tropical forester in Haiti, Paraguay and Brazil where he witnessed first-hand effects of extreme degradation of natural ecosystems. Previously, he led the MacArthur Foundation's conservation and sustainable resource programme, taking a whole systems approach to build a financial and sustainability community and pioneering the concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). In 1998, Michael founded Forest Trends to advance these emerging environmental markets, adoption and spread of PES as a powerful conversation tool and means to mitigate climate change. For his work, Michael received several awards including the Global Leader on Sustainable Forestry, Chief Global Stewardship Award from the US Forest Service and the Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award.