Role
Sustainable Business Specialist (Asia)
Specialisms
Sustainable business management
Contact links
Eleanor Spencer leads Southeast Asia-focused work streams within the Sustainable Business and Finance programme – in particular, managing the team’s engagement with key stakeholders in the palm oil sector.
This includes working with supply chain companies, financiers and other NGOs, as well as representing ZSL in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) on the Board of Governors, as an alternate Environmental NGO member.
Eleanor originally joined the team in 2015, with a focus on engagement with the financial sector on sustainable palm oil and forestry financing, before switching to her current role in 2020. She has experience in supply chain sustainability and governance across various other soft commodity sectors, including soy, cattle and seaweed, and holds an MSc in Biodiversity Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford.
Professional Accreditations
- MSc Biodiversity Conservation and Management, University of Oxford
- MSc thesis: "Is certification the answer? A consideration of local power and perspectives in a seaweed value chain"
- Tropical Agriculture Award Fund (TAAF) research grant awardee
- BSc Wildlife Conservation, Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent
- Investment Foundations certificate, CFA Institute
Major projects
- SPOTT soft-commodity company assessments
- Landscape-level HCV priority mapping in Indonesia
- Support to soft-commodity producers on wildlife monitoring