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Ganga Ram Dahal
Technical Director for Forestry and Climate Change
Ganga is a Forestry scientist who has devoted his long career of 30 years to the relationships between forest conservation and sustainable natural resources management. His expertise covers areas from agroforestry forest, land tenure, indigenous rights and livelihoods resilience, food security, forestry tenure, climate change adaptation, and REDD+.
He has more than 20 years of solid field experience working with international organizations (FAO, WB, UNDP, CIFOR, SWISS DANIDA, etc.) and NGOs undertaking research, analysis, providing leadership management of large projects, capacity building, and advocacy at national, regional (Asia in particular).
Ganga’s expertise extends wide across Asian countries (Indonesia, Viet Nam, Nepal, China, India, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand) where he has built a strong credibility among Forestry Institutions, providing analysis and policy advice to institutions necessary for sustainable natural resource management and for addressing vulnerability of livelihoods and climate change through resilience building. He successfully spearheaded global and regional research works as a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) headquarters in Bogor, Indonesia covering countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Similarly, Ganga worked for a decade with The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) a global coalition of more than 200 organizations dedicated to advancing the land and resource rights of local peoples to securing indigenous and community land rights. He was providing strategic advice on forest management, livelihoods, poverty, and climate change vulnerability, forest land tenure policies. He has excellent capacity to facilitate and organize policy dialogues, multi-stakeholders’ meetings, workshops and discussions.
An excellent writer and practitioner, he has translated his experience in the field with end users into operation manuals for sustainable development that are broadly used by local policy makers. He is a leading regular contributor to scientific publications on areas such as Forest Decentralization in Asia and the Pacific, Forest for People, Forest Tenure Assessment in Asia and the Pacific and all have a considerable practical application of science to decision making and policy rational choices.
He has published many journal papers, policy briefs related to forests, REDD+ and climate change, forest land tenure and livelihoods.
He speaks fluently and writes professionally English and Nepali, both his native languages and has a proficient command of Hindi and Bahasa Indonesia.
He earned PhD and M.A. from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, focusing his research on natural resource management. He also obtained degrees in sociology and agro-forestry from Nepal and India.