Alexander Buck

Alexander Buck studied forestry at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences (BOKU), Vienna, and law at the University of Vienna, Austria. He started his professional career at BOKU University where his research focused on forest certification. 

From 1998, he was part of a small team which prepared the 4th Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe, held in April 2003 in Vienna, Austria. He played a key role in shaping a pan-European approach to national forest programmes (nfps) which has since become one the most important policy tools of the Forest Europe process.

Alexander then joined the IUFRO Secretariat as Deputy Executive Director and was instrumental in positioning IUFRO at the science-policy interface and in coordinating its scientific contributions to key intergovernmental decision-making processes. 

From 2007 to 2010, Alexander served as Coordinator of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests’ Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP), an initiative which he had developed jointly with former IUFRO President Professor Risto Seppälä. 

In 2010, he was appointed IUFRO Executive Director. Alexander is a member of the advisory boards of various forest-related international initiatives, including the Program of Forests (PROFOR), the REDD+ Academy Advisory Group, and Yale University’s Governance, Environment and Markets (GEM) Initiative.