Keynote Speakers

Minister Malcolm Noonan Malcolm Noonan is a TD representing the Carlow Kilkenny Constituency and was appointed Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform in July 2020.

First elected to Kilkenny Borough Council and Kilkenny County Council in 2004, he has served sixteen years in local government and was Mayor of Kilkenny in 2009; the first Green Party Mayor in the City’s long history. He served for a short time as Irish Delegate on the EU Committee of the Regions and Co-Chair of the All Island Nuclear Free Local Authorities Forum.

Malcolm’s background prior to entering electoral politics was in environmental and community activism, as a director and national coordinator with Friends of the Earth Ireland and involvement in community-based activism; biodiversity, climate action, mobility, disability advocacy, integration, Traveller development and mental health.

His professional work has spanned landscape gardening, suicide prevention and graphic design. He holds qualifications in industrial design and a BA(Hons) in Rural Development.

Dianna Kopansky is the Coordinator of the Global Peatlands Initiative in the Biodiversity and Land Management Branch at UN Environment Programme, based in Nairobi, Kenya. An expert in ecosystems and biodiversity, she delivers a suite of landscape management and climate change programmes bringing science to policy to contribute to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Dianna has worked in Africa for over 22 years on a range of issues within the emergency, humanitarian, and development fields. For UNEP, she works globally and has led teams to develop and implement projects such as the Global Peatlands Initiative, UN-REDD Programme, Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, UNDAF and 17 MDG-F Environment and Climate Change Joint Projects to name a few.

Harm Schoten is the Director at Eurosite – the European Land Conservation Network

Since 2021 Harm Schoten leads Eurosite, the pan-European network of natural site managers and conservation practitioners managing over 18 million hectares of Europe’s nature. On behalf of its members Eurosite facilitates creating opportunities for information exchange to boost ecological restoration and natural climate solutions, always from a practical viewpoint and with the use of the newest innovative technologies. Eurosite’s members are at the heart of European efforts to foster peatland restoration and conservation, as part of the global peatland movement.

Franziska Tanneberger is a peatland scientist at Greifswald University and Director of the Greifswald Mire Centre, Germany. She works on fen mire ecology and biodiversity, paludiculture, and peatland restoration, particularly within carbon schemes. She has coordinated peatland research and conservation projects in Germany, Russia, Belarus, and Poland and is co-editor of the "European Mires Book" (2017).

Inge Keymeulen is Geographer; has spent most of her professional life in Southern Europe, where in 1997 she first got in touch with the management of EU funded projects.

EU Project officer in the Mediterranean area from 2013 to 2018, supervising and monitoring EU-funded cooperation projects implemented in the Northern, Southern and Eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea basin.

Project officer at the Joint Secretariat of the NWE Interreg Programme in Lille since April 2018, working mainly with projects addressing Resources and materials efficiency and Low Carbon, with a focus on the support to the shift towards a low carbon economy in all sectors.

Suzanne Nally is a Director of the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage where she oversees the conservation and restoration of protected peatlands to maximise the benefits for biodiversity. Suzanne is also a member of the Peatlands Council and sits on steering groups for a number of peatlands projects. Suzanne is especially inspired in empowering community led conservation and in strengthening collaborations on peatlands across Europe.

Maurice Eakin has worked with the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht since 1999. In 2015 he was appointed Senior Wetland Ecologist with the Science and Biodiversity Unit. Since that time a lot of his work has been on raised bog conservation and restoration, with a focus on efforts to meet Ireland’s commitments to the Habitats Directive. He is responsible for managing survey, research and monitoring work on Ireland’s wetland habitats and for communicating the results of this work within the scientific community and to the public at large.

Hans Schutten is Programme Head Climate-smart Land Use at Wetlands International since April 2020 and leads their peatlands program on a global level. He has 35 years’ experience in wetland restoration, ecology and management. As an ecological expert he provided advice on national and international levels for example to the EU Environmental Protection Agencies and the European Commission.

John Couwenberg is currently interim-leader of the Peatland Studies and Palaeoecology group at the Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology at the University of Greifswald (Germany). He has a wide interest in mires and peatlands, including their ecology, palaeoecology, ecohydrology, systems ecology (self-organisation), conservation, wet use (paludiculture) and greenhouse gas fluxes. He has worked on IPCC reporting and accounting guidelines as well as on voluntary carbon markets and quantification and commodification of other ecosystem services. With his team, he developed the GEST model for assessing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from degraded and rewetted peatlands using vegetation as a proxy.

Rudy van Diggelen joined Antwerp University in November 2008 as expert in the field of vegetation Ecology. He has conducted research in the domain of ecology and nature management with special emphasis on restoration ecology. He is one of the founders of the landscape eco-hydrological system analysis LESA a standard impact assessment procedure in the Netherlands and Flanders. He started the first large scale research program on heathland restoration on former arable fields which ran for over a decade. He carried out his studies in several European countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovak republic.

Between 2001 and 2006 van Diggelen was president of the European section of the Society for Ecological Restoration International SERI. He was also member of the board of directors of the mother organisation SER International. He is a member of several advisory committees of Dutch and Flemish ministries.

Jakub Wejchert is a senior policy officer at the, DG Environment, European Commission. He currently works on the team developing the Nature Restoration Law. This has included work on concept development, ecosystem restoration, target setting, biodiversity indicators, ecosystem condition, as well as socio-economic aspects. Previously he contributed to the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and prior to that the EU negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals. He holds a PhD and BA in Natural Sciences, from Trinity College Dublin. He recently received an Advanced Diploma on Ecological Monitoring from the University of Cambridge.