Scott Poynton Claimed

Scott is a Forest Therapy Guide and believes that if he can help as many as people connect with Nature and themselves, the world would be a better place.

Scott grew up in rural Australia, on the outskirts of Melbourne. From a young age, he learned to love Nature and formed a deep, personal connection with forests, deciding three days after his 15th birthday to dedicate his life to forest conservation. He studied forestry at the Australian National University before working as a forester in Tasmania, Vietnam and in more than 30 countries.

Scott was awarded a scholarship to study a forestry Masters degree at the University of Oxford before starting his own non-profit, the Tropical Forest Trust (TFT), in March 1999. As TFT expanded beyond the tropics, it became The Forest Trust, pioneering responsible sourcing and establishing forest conservation and social livelihood programs that protected millions of hectares of forest and the human rights of millions. He mediated disputes between some of the world’s largest companies and NGOs that led to transformations across entire industries. When he stepped aside as CEO at the end of 2015, TFT had 265 people working in 48 countries on more than 20 different commodity value chains, impacting the social and environmental credentials of more than $1 trillion of annual supply chain transactions.

He left TFT in August 2019 and founded adifferentway Ltd, a coaching and mentoring community to support people to bring change in their own lives and in the world. In January 2021, he founded Pond Foundation to change the way the world acts on climate change and to promote regenerative action.

With more than  25 years as a social entrepreneur, Scott is leading a major regenerative agriculture project in northern Ghana that is bringing life back to soils and hope and improved livelihoods to more than 7,000 farmers, almost half of them women.