Patrick Hardcastle is a Forestry Development Specialist who has worked in over 40 countries in the last 55 years. He started his career with 12 years in the Malawi Forestry Department, the last eight heading the Forestry Research Institute while specialising in silviculture and site classification. He followed this with 10 years of mainly post-graduate teaching at the Universities of Oxford and Aberdeen. Thereafter, he has been a consultant working with major bilateral and multilateral donors with a focus on forestry but increasingly also engaged with biodiversity conservation, climate change, economic and social equity within the broad framework of sustainable forest management.