Paul Dettmann - Biography
Paul Dettmann is a respected leader in the field of environmental services with 20 years’ experience in the development of biodiversity-based land restoration projects in Australia and overseas. He is an agronomist by training, 6th generation farmer, philanthropist and a social enterprise community leader. He has had experience working in a range of countries, including: Australia, India, Ethiopia, Senegal, Angola, Niger, Peru, Brazil, and the United States.
Paul is the founder of Cassinia Environmental, one of Australia’s leading environmental services companies, specialising in biodiversity offsets, carbon market advisory, environmental protection and conservation services.
Cassinia has purchased, replanted and protected over 30,000 hectares of land, in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania, and has worked closely with Trust for Nature over a number of years becoming its largest private land covenanting partner. Cassinia also works with both government and corporate sectors, with its partners including: Greenfleet, Bendigo Bank, Landlife, and a number of state government agencies and regional local governments, while working closely with localised Traditional Owner groups.
In 2022, Paul launched Wilderlands, one of the world’s first voluntary biodiversity credits as a means to make conservation accessible to the everyman. Since then, over 120,000 square metres of vulnerable Australian habitat has been protected by supporters.
Wilderlands, co-founded by (from left) Paul Dettmann, Ash Knop and Heath Evans
Paul began his career as an agronomist with iconic agricultural services company Elders, and subsequently found his way into the environmental services sector working with World Vision Australia as an International Carbon Market Specialist in their Climate Change Response Initiative.
Between 2005-2009 he was a consultant to the World Bank creating the first large-scale afforestation/reforestation “clean development mechanism (CDM)” project in Africa, which resulted in a community led and owned program that benefited a community of 65,000 people in southern Ethiopia.
He has also worked on a Victorian Government funded project with SKM Consulting that provided resources to farmers and landholders on engaging with carbon markets through carbon sequestration in native forest restoration, (‘Growing Trees for Carbon and Conservation – a toolkit for landholders and purchasers’).
Paul is also an active member in the social enterprise sector, supporting a number of initiatives through Cassinia Community, the social impact arm of Cassinia. These projects both local and overseas include the Banyan Education Fund, A Place To Call Home, The Human Dignity Project, Community Reconciliation and The Social Foundry, a not-for-profit community initiative that through its café, provides work-life skills and mentoring to members of the community whose opportunities have been limited, including at risk youth.
The Social Foundry is a Not for Profit social enterprise in Kyneton, Victoria
Paul holds a Master of Applied Science by research from the University of Melbourne (Investigating Quality Management and Perceptions of Remnant Vegetation in the Box-Ironbark Region of Victoria) and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Melbourne, Dookie College, where he was Dux of 1996 and the recipient of the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science Prize.
He has three times been a finalist in United Nations Environment Awards for Biodiversity (2010, 2011 and 2013). In 2002 Paul was the inaugural winner of the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s “Young People in Rural Industry Travel Scholarship”, which facilitated a study tour of the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, examining private sector development in biosequestration practices.
In 1997 he was the Young Australian of the Year for Regional Development (in Victoria), awarded by the National Australia Day Council and has been a member of the Baynton Sidonia Country Fire Authority Brigade for over 20 years.
