Anthony Mills
Dr Anthony Mills is CEO of AfriCarbon (Pty) Ltd and C4 EcoSolutions (Pty) Ltd. The latter is a consulting business with its main focus being i) developing adaptation to climate change projects for the United Nations Development Programme in Africa and Asia, ii) conducting scientific research on carbon sequestration and soil-plant relationships, and iii) developing Clean Development Mechanism and Voluntary Carbon Standard project documents for the generation of carbon credits. Anthony's scientific background is in ecology and soil science, and he remains a consulting staff member in the Soil Science Department of Stellenbosch University, where he undertook his PhD studies. His work in the department includes managing the soils component of a large research project (BIOTA) that is investigating the effects of climate change on ecosystems from the tip of southern Africa to northern Namibia.
Anthony has examined both professionally and academically carbon stocks in several ecosystems in South Africa. The results from the Eastern Cape thicket were newsworthy: degradation of thicket by goats resulted in surprisingly large losses of carbon - up to 100 tonnes per hectare - from the landscape. In a subsequent study, Anthony and Professor Richard Cowling showed that this lost carbon returns remarkably quickly in sites where spekboom cuttings have been used to restore the thicket ecosystem. Converting soil and plant carbon into carbon credits for sale on international markets requires a rigorous scientific approach to the measurement of carbon over time. Anthony has published extensively on carbon stocks in thicket in peer-reviewed scientific journals and is bringing this knowledge to bear in AfriCarbon's thicket restoration roll-out by leading the write-up of carbon sequestration project design documents.
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Ayanda Sigwela
Dr Ayanda Sigwela is a restoration ecologist providing scientific advice on a wide range of on-the-ground restoration projects funded by the South African government's Working for Woodlands programme in the Eastern Cape. His main projects include large-scale restoration of degraded thicket using spekboom cuttings in Addo Elephant National Park as well as the Pedi communal area near the Fish River, and restoration of coastal forests using a range of different forest tree species in the Transkei. In his PhD thesis, Ayanda examined the effect of goat degradation on ecological processes in thicket, including the survivorship of thicket seedlings. After his PhD, Ayanda worked for South African National Parks as their restoration ecologist for four years. Ayanda's wealth of on-the-ground experience with nurturing ecosystems back into life will be a key ingredient for implementing AfriCarbon's vision of thicket restoration over hundreds of thousands of hectares.
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Noel Mills
Noel Mills has been involved in property, investment and finance in South Africa and internationally In 1997, Noel retired and bought the farm Rockwood in the Cederberg Mountains, where he has been farming protea flowers and buchu oils with his wife Pam ever since. Restoration of thicket on a large scale will require acumen and experience in property, business and farming. Noel's experience in all of these fields is consequently of great importance for realizing AfriCarbon's vision of large scale thicket restoration with investors and other participants.
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Richard Cowling
Professor Richard Cowling is a botanist and conservation scientist based at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. He has been researching the ecology and origins of thicket for much of his career, starting with his PhD thesis in 1983, in which he examined the relationships between soil properties, topography and thicket types. Restoring degraded thicket needs a keen ecological eye for determining where spekboom used to grow in profusion in a particular landscape. Richard's wealth of field and academic experience enables him to read landscapes with such an eye, and to home in on the dominant ecological forces at play - whether they are fire, frost, soils, herbivores or microclimate. Richard's academic credentials are exceptional and have been recognized by no less than the US National Academy of Sciences in the United States, which recently admitted him into their august membership. Only two other South African scientists have this achievement behind their name. Richard initiated and directed the Institute for Plant Conservation (IPC) at the University of Cape Town (1992-2000); in 1998 the IPC was evaluated by peers as the best university-based conservation unit in the world. Richard has an excellent record in project management, having facilitated the implementation of many donor-funded conservation projects. He has served on 79 national and international committees and has chaired 11 of them. Later this year, Richard and his wife Shirley are bringing out a coffee table book on thicket which covers the rich diversity of thicket types, its mysterious origins in the tropical forests of central Africa and the splendour of the thicket landscapes.
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