Paulina Villalpando

Paulina has revved up the activity-level and impact potential of the High Conservation Value (HCV) Resource Network, whose members include World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute, and the Nature Conservancy. HCV is a systematic approach to forest management and land use that designates important habitat for conservation. The HCV Network gets corporate players to sign on to their global standard and trains auditors to identify and monitor high conservation value areas where those corporations operate. HCV areas range from old-growth forests in Siberia to habitats of threatened orangutans in Southeast Asia.

The roster of companies that apply the HCV standard to remove deforestation from their investments and supply chains includes McDonald's, Nestle, Cargill, Walmart, Bank of America and CitiGroup. Key industries — forestry, palm oil, sugarcane, and soy — are highly centralized and harnessing the influence of critical actors has an outsized effect. Paulina has worked to increase consistent implementation of the HCV standard in these sectors, with buy-in of major corporate players. The HCV approach holds huge promise to save vital forests and mitigate the devastation too often associated with agricultural commodities.