Boris Greguska

Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Slovak Republic

Chief State Counsellor

Description

He was born in Trnava in 1976. He grew up in close touch with forests in a central part of the Little Carpathians, the western Slovakia. He started studying forestry at a secondary school in Banská Štiavnica when he was fourteen. He successfully finalized his studies there in 1995. Later, he graduated from the Technical University in Zvolen where he obtained a Master of Science degree in forestry (2000) and a Philosophiae Doctor degree in forest economics (2007). Since 2001, he has worked as an expert counsellor, state counsellor and finally chief state counsellor at the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development with main responsibility for an international forest agenda. During this time, he has represented Slovakia in a number of international organisations and processes, including the European Union and the United Nations. In 2014-2017, he worked for the Permanent Representation of the Slovak Republic to the European Union in Brussels. He led the European Union and its Member States in global negotiations on the protection and sustainable development of the world’s forests during the Slovak and Maltese Presidency of the Council of the European Union. That included also negotiations on the first ever United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests in 2016 and 2017. He actively participated in the development of resolutions from Madrid (2015) and Bratislava (2021) Ministerial Conferences on the Protection of Forests in Europe (FOREST EUROPE). He actively contributed to the work on the development of the Forest Protocol (2011) to the Carpathian Convention. From 2018 to 2020, he was a Chairman of the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), a highest body in the United Nations system responsible for world’s forests. He has actively helped colleagues from other countries, accessing to the European Union, by transferring his professional knowledge on international forest policies within projects of official development assistance and the European Union instruments.