Sten Nilsson

Biography

Sten Nilsson is a senior guest research scholar in the Agriculture Forestry and Ecosystem Services Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program. Over the years, he has developed many working and research foci including sector policies, strategies, and governance; structural change and transformation; new forest products; bioeconomy; climate change and greenhouse gas balances; and land availability, land-use, deforestation, and landscape management. A crucial part of these analyses has been to assess the societal impacts of policies, strategies, structural changes and transformations of the forest sector and the formation of ‘social contracts' between government, the forest sector, and civil society.

A native of Sweden, Nilsson has had a distinguished academic career in forest sector analysis with an emphasis on policy analysis and has worked on forest sector related issues in all the European countries, Russia, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, the USA, and Canada. He has authored and coauthored some 400 scientific publications and is frequently asked to address international meetings and organizations on different issues dealing with the forest sector. Since the early 1990s, he has also been contributing to the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which, together with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

He has held numerous consultancies in organizations such as The World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Commission, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). He also served as an expert in different international organizations such as the World Commission on Forests and Sustainable Development (WCFSD), the International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA), the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), the Ministerial conference on the protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Forest Trends, and the Rights and Resources Initiative.

Nilsson first joined IIASA in January 1986, becoming leader of the former Forestry Program in 1990. Between 1998 and 2002, he was counselor to the director and was appointed deputy director from July 2002 to May 2008. From May 2008 to January 2009, he was acting director of IIASA. Since his retirement from the IIASA management in 2009, Nilsson has been affiliated with numerous organizations, and is the CEO of the consulting firm Forest Sector Insights AB. In particular, he has worked as a consultant on the transformation of the forest industry and forest sector, and the transformation to a bio-economy for national and international organizations, as well as the forest industry itself.

From 2010 to 2015, he was assigned as an advisor to the Forest Products Association of Canada and the Canadian Government through the Canadian Forest Service with respect to the transformation of the Canadian forest industry to a new bio-oriented industry. He undertook similar assignments with the American forest sector through the Georgia Institute of Paper Technology from 2012 to 2013, in Atlanta, USA. In 2012 and 2013 he also worked on behalf of the All-Party Committee on Environmental Objectives of the Swedish Parliament to develop a new process for policy setting in the Swedish forest sector, resulting in a Governmental Bill on a National Forest Program.

From 2014 to 2016, his major working tasks were land availability, land-use, expanding agriculture and global deforestation, innovation, and the development of the bioeconomy on behalf of different international organizations. In 2016, he engaged in the implementation of the Swedish National Forest Program and a development strategy for the forest sector in Georgia (Tbilisi) on behalf of GIZ, Germany. In 2017, his major task was to develop scenarios on future global developments for IUFRO’s strategic planning and a study on the social impacts of the transformation of the European forest sector on behalf of the German government.

From 2018 to 2019, he mainly served as an adviser to an investment bank involved in supporting the development of sustainable forest sectors in South-East Asia based on fast-growing plantations. This assignment is ongoing. Since mid-2019 he has also been team leader for the development of a new strategy for the Asian Forest Cooperation Organization (AFoCO) based in Seoul, Korea, with the objective to increase the cooperation on forestry and climate change mitigation between countries in Asia. Furthermore, he is engaged by the Swedish Government to carry out analyses of global development impacts on the Swedish forest sector.


Last update: 30 JUN 2023