Jade Saunders is the Executive Director of World Forest ID with particular emphasis on building the organization's analytical, scientific and legal capacity. Under her leadership, organizational funding has more than doubled as a result of rapid donor diversification and a growing range of dynamic and quantifiable real world impacts. Jade is also a 2024 Mulago Fellow, awarded to ambitious non-profit leaders with scalable solutions to global environmental and conservation challenges. This fellowship celebrates Jade's dedication and expertise in driving impactful change through the application of scientific methods to protect forests. It will empower her to enhance the organization's capacity in ensuring accountability within forest-connected supply chains. Prior to World Forest ID Jade was a senior policy analyst at Forest Trends in Washington D.C. and strategy advisor to The UK Satellite Applications Catapult on their European Space Agency-funded ForestMind project. At Forest Trends Jade established the Timber Regulation Enforcement Exchange (TREE) program of research and facilitation, a decade-long project which brought together regulators, investigators and prosecutors with a mandate to tackle the trade in illegally logged timber, generating actionable intelligence and unique examples of collaborative international case-building. The founding focus of the group was the commonality between US Lacey Act, EU Timber regulation and Australian Illegal Logging Prohibition Act, which, after a decade, resulted in partnerships and impacts that expanded into the Asia Pacific Region and beyond. From the policy perspective, Jade has worked on forest governance, trade and environmental crime for over 20 years, most notably as an Associate Fellow of the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House, with a wide ranging remit to explore legislative mechanisms linking forest governance and trade; particularly the principles and practicalities of tackling deforestation and forest degradation through supply chain regulation. Between 2019 and 2022, Jade was a technical advisor to the UK Government and EU civil society on the core principles necessary to effective legislation to tackle the trade in agricultural commodities from deforested land, with specific focus on traceability and enforceability.
