Gilles de Boncourt
Board Member
Term of Office: 2025 - 2028
Gilles is a retired forestry engineer with more than 40 years’ experience in leading the second largest forestry cooperative in France, UNISYLVA, representing 13,500 private forest owners and 375,000 hectares of softwood and hardwood forests in central France.
As CEO, Gilles lead the Cooperative's main activities including forest management, sylviculture, timber selling, expertise and development engineering, auditing and marketing work in various European countries, industrial partnerships through long-term supply contracts at European scale, adapting sylviculture to climate change.
Gilles has been involved in PEFC from the very beginning in France, as one of the first advocates for forest owners in the 1990s to implement a certification model that gave them a voice. Gilles developed the concept of group certification in France, developing this new concept in practice within his own cooperative.
Recently retired, Gilles is still very active as Board Member of a French forest management group and Executive Vice-Chair and co-founder of a network for autism.