My friend and former colleague Simon Rietbergen, who has died aged 65 from multiple brain tumours, was a forestry expert who worked extensively worldwide to protect endangered forests, but especially in Africa, from the Congo Basin to the degraded drylands of the Sahel.
Simon was deeply committed to developing progressive approaches to tropical forests that would not impinge negatively on the lives of people who live in and near them, and who depend on them for their livelihoods.
He was born in The Hague, in the Netherlands, to Elisabeth de Bruijn and Evert Rietbergen, a primary school teacher and headteacher respectively. After attending Dalton Den Haag, a bilingual international secondary school, he gained a BSc and MSc in tropical forestry at Wageningen University.
From 1986 he worked as a senior forestry research associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, where in 1991 he met and married Jennifer McCracken, a researcher and writer on natural resource management issues in the global south.
Moving on to be a senior forestry research specialist at the World Bank in Washington DC (1992-97), he then became senior forest conservation programme officer at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (1997-2007) in Gland, Switzerland, where we worked together.
From 2007 to 2009 he was senior project manager at the Prince’s Rainforest Project in London, and finally he became senior forestry expert at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome from 2014 onwards.
Simon’s greatest contribution to protecting the world’s forests and their people turned out to be his outstanding leadership skills. He became a highly successful team leader on huge multi-level forestry projects, where good-humoured external policy engagement and internal team support were of equal importance. He will be remembered not only for the many successful changes he brought about, but also for his morale-boosting presence.
One of his final achievements, in July 2025, was to launch the $150m African-led Great Green Wall initiative, which aims to combat deforestation by re-establishing vegetation along a band running 5,000 miles across the Sahel. The buildup to the launch of the project involved him leading and managing teams in eight countries in the Sahel over several years.
He is survived by Jennifer, their children Emma, Sam and Lily, and his brothers, Evert Jan and Hans.