Dr Amara Okonkwo joins as science director
Amara Okonkwo, a forest ecologist who spent twelve years on restoration in West Africa, has joined to lead our science.
Dr Amara Okonkwo joined us in July 2025 to lead our science. She is a forest ecologist who spent twelve years on restoration work in West Africa, and she came to us from a career split fairly evenly between field plots and policy rooms.
That split is exactly the range the job needs. Our science has to stand up in a peer-reviewed journal and also survive a sceptical official across a table in a provincial capital, and not many people are comfortable in both rooms.
Her first move was to go through how we report carbon and tighten it, hard. That work led directly to the method paper that passed peer review this spring, and to the independent Kenya audit coming in close to our own figures rather than wildly off.
She has been blunt with us, from the first week, about where our data was thin. There were plots we had reported confidently on the strength of a single year's measurement, and claims we had made that the underlying numbers did not really support.
We hired her to do exactly that. It would have been easier to bring in someone who told the fundraising team what it wanted to hear, and far worse. A science team that only confirms the cheerful version is worse than no science team at all, because it lends a false weight to claims that have not been tested.
The discomfort is the point. Our carbon figures are lower and our survival reporting is honester since she arrived, and both of those are wins even though neither makes for an easy fundraising line.
