Meet Chris, EIA’s newest forests campaign investigator!

Say hello to Chris Moye, who has just joined EIA as part of the Forest team, filling the role of Specialist Investigator.

I was born in Brazil, educated in the UK and have previously worked for a number of NGOs on issues ranging from human rights abuses to environmental rights.

In 2007, I helped research and write the report Fuelling Fear for the NGO War On Want, which detailed the human rights abuses and massive displacements suffered by Afro-Colombians in the south-west region of Colombia due to the environmentally damaging and unsustainable global push for biofuels. The report was provided as evidence to the UK Parliament’s Human Rights Joint Committee.

In 2008, I worked for Peace Brigades International (PBI) in Guatemala, traveling the country to investigate a number of human rights abuses regarding major development projects, threats to human rights defenders and state corruption, work which culminating in the report Neo-liberalism, the Mesoamerica Project and corporate power, and their link to environmental and human rights abuses in Guatemala.

After that, I worked for Peace Brigades International in the UK as an Advocacy Officer for the five field projects that PBI has in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Indonesia and Nepal, lobbying for improved human rights standards in those countries, whilst also briefly helping set up the Peace Brigades International Honduras research delegation, which looked into human rights abuses occurring in that country subsequent to the coup.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked for the Association of Forest Communities UtzChe in Guatemala as part of the Global Witness-run Forest Transparency and Governance Project, working to improve forest governance and ensuring that state efforts aimed at implementing laws related to the forest sector were improved.

While at UtzChe, I researched and wrote the Guatemalan 2011 Annual Transparency Report card, analysing levels of transparency and governance in the forest sector in Guatemala. In addition to this, and in representation of UtzChe, he participated in the formal REDD+ implementation process in Guatemala, helping draft sections of the Readiness Preparation Proposal as part of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility process, to which Guatemala has signed up, as well as working on the Climate Change Framework Law, attempting to ensure that those elements of the law that related to forests and indigenous people’s rights were improved and kept in the final draft.

I also oversaw projects that provided workshops to some of the 34 UtzChe indigenous communities on environmental rights, climate change and on how to use the freedom of information law to improve transparent government at the local level.

Finally, I’ve coordinated six projects whose aims varied from monitoring how the judiciary dealt with forest infractions and how the Guatemalan forest incentive schemes were being implemented in the northwest of the country to improving women’s access to forest management and producing a website on communal land tenure rights.

I’m also fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, and in my spare time am working on a Masters in International Environmental Law from the International Institute of Environmental Education.