Petra Westerlaan

Freelance Consultant

Petra Westerlaan is an independent consultant with 15 years of international experience in (tropical) forest management, nature-based solutions, certification, payments for ecosystem services, and sustainable commodity supply chains. She combines technical expertise in forest carbon, biodiversity, and ecosystem services with facilitation skills. Petra describes herself as a sense-maker with the ability to navigate complexity and translate it into an actionable way forward.

She has extensive experience in undertaking desk research to inform strategies or guidance development, in facilitation of working group meetings and stakeholder engagement, and in senior advisory work including social and environmental risk assessments, due diligence and sustainability reporting. Her work spans different scales – from the international, to regional, country-level and subnational regions and individual companies. Petra uses Dutch, English, Spanish and French professionally.