Edna Maguigad

Senior Fellow | Natural Resource Governance and Safeguards, Access and Benefit-Sharing, REDD+

A legal and policy specialist for 18 years now, Edna started as a development lawyer with a legal NGO in the Philippines, capacitating farmers, workers, urban poor, women, and local communities to understand the law and use or change it to improve lives. She also coordinated the NGO’s local governance program until 2009.

Since then she has worked on natural resource governance and climate change, including agrobiodiversity; farmers’ rights to seeds; biodiversity; forest policy and governance; REDD+ and safeguards, among other issues, with various national and international organizations. She also taught environment law and agrarian reform law in three universities in Manila.

She has been the Non-timber Forest Product-Exchange Program (NTFP-EP) Policy and Governance Adviser for eight years and has also worked with the Government of the Philippines–Department of Environment and Natural Resources as consultant in several programs, including policy development for Biodiversity-Friendly Enterprises and the National REDD-Plus Action Plan 2021-2031. In the past two years, she has been working as a UNDP policy specialist for program development for the Global Environmental Facility on Implementation of the Nagoya Protocol, Land Degradation under the UN Desertification Convenion, and Marine Wildlife Conservation.

At present, she is designing forest carbon projects with NGOs and private sector groups in the Philippines.