Benoît Clément

Benoît develops and leads Verra’s financial innovation strategy. His role focuses on leveraging existing Verra standards and developing new frameworks and tools to unlock and scale up investment into climate action and sustainable development.

Benoît began his career with seven years in finance before finding his passion and focusing on sustainable development. He has led projects and programs in watershed restoration, wildfire disaster recovery, regenerative agriculture, and agroforestry, working with non-profits, governments, and corporations, as well as establishing his own companies.

Before joining Verra, Benoît worked at ReForestry, a startup he co-founded to develop a FinTech product for aggregating micro-loans for unbankable, smallholder farmers to develop landscape-scale regenerative agroforestry in developing countries. At ReForestry, Benoît was the COO and later interim CEO, responsible for creating the company’s vision, values, and performance metrics, and leading all aspects of organizational development. This involved managing international and local partnerships with government, finance, research, agriculture, and technology institutions. Benoit completed his MBA in Sustainability Management in Switzerland.

Benoît enjoys tending to his tree nursery at home, hiking, foraging for herbs, tree cuttings, and mushrooms, mountain biking, flow arts, reading (mostly non-fiction psychology, how-to, and nature-based books), and exploring countries and cultures unfamiliar to him.