Judges


Judges

The independent panel of three judges with distinguished backgrounds will evaluate this year’s submissions based on their potential to inspire real, positive, and bold transformation and that are collaborative, actionable and scalable. They are all leaders and experts from relevant sectors of the palm oil/and or sustainability industry. The Shared Responsibility for Market Transformation Award will not be evaluated by the judges as this will be based on predefined criteria.

Dr Erik Meijaard
Honorary Professor of Conservation Science
University of Kent

KHOR Yu Leng (Ms)
Senior Economist, Segi Enam Advisors
and
Senior Fellow (Sustainability), Singapore Institute of International Affairs

Dr. Nadine Ruppert, PhD
Senior Lecturer,
School of Biological Sciences,
Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM)
Enquiries? Please email: [email protected].

Dr Erik Meijaard


Honorary Professor of Conservation Science
University of Kent

Erik Meijaard is a conservation scientist and practitioner with 30 years of experience working in the Asian tropics on wildlife management. He is Managing Director at Borneo Futures in Brunei Darussalam and Honorary Professor at the University of Kent and The University of Queensland, and has chaired the IUCN Oil Crops Task Force since 2017, leading the groups research and communication on the sustainability of different vegetable oil crops.

Erik works on improving biodiversity management in oil palm plantations, and is seeking new and effective methods for monitoring biodiversity trends and impacts through citizen science.

KHOR Yu Leng (Ms)


Senior Economist, Segi Enam Advisors
and
Senior Fellow (Sustainability), Singapore Institute of International Affairs

Ms KHOR Yu Leng is senior economist at Segi Enam Advisors, and Senior Fellow (Sustainability) at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. She works on ESG, trade, competition, supply-chains and more. Yu Leng has followed the progression of certified palm products and waste via RSPO, ISCC and NDPE assurance into the regulatory era. She is a specialist on the political economy of smallholders.

Trained at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, she started her career at financial institutions. She is independent director at SIPEF and at Rimba Collective, a palm user-led initiative for long-term forest conservation and restoration.

Dr. Nadine Ruppert, PhD


Senior Lecturer,
School of Biological Sciences,
Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM)

Dr. Nadine Ruppert is a Senior Lecturer at School of Biological Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. With a MSc in Tropical Biology & Animal Ecology from University Wuerzburg, Germany, and a PhD in Mammalogy from USM, she has been involved in zoological fieldwork in Malaysia since 2005. She is the co-founder and vice-president of the Malaysian Primatological Society (MPS), an NGO recognised for primate conservation through education, research, and public engagement.

Dr. Nadine’s wish is to educate and empower local communities to protect Malaysia’s unique biodiversity heritage. Her work on the role of southern pig-tailed macaques as biological rodent pest control in Malaysian oil plantations has gathered global attention in 2019. As an outreach project under the umbrella of MPS, she founded the Sustainable Palm Oil Movement to increase global awareness on shifting to sustainable practices in oil palm agriculture while countering the global blanket calls for palm oil boycotts.