Imperial College London
Grantham Institute for Climate Change
Department of Life Sciences
Silwood Park Campus
Buckhurst Road
Ascot, Berkshire,
SL5 7PY, UK

t: +44 (0)7939 254 564
e: j.mcnamara09@imperial.ac.uk
skype: James McNamara

Current research

My work, which is being carried out in partnership with the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Zoological Society of London, is looking at the effects of climate change and other drivers on biodiversity loss in West Africa.

Unsustainable hunting of bushmeat is widely regarded as the main driver of biodiversity loss in West Africa, particularly in rural areas where communities rely heavily on their natural resources for their livelihoods.

The behaviour of the hunters is itself influenced by many factors such as changes in food prices or the introduction or enforcement of new regulation or policy. It is now also becoming increasingly apparent that climate change is impacting the natural environment, and playing a part, both directly, such as through changes in rainfall or fruiting behaviour and indirectly, as a result of changes which might affect harvests and drive humans to seek alternative incomes from logging, hunting or fishing.

There is a clear need to better understand the link between climate change and the drivers that affect human hunting behaviour and the resultant biodiversity loss if management strategies are to be better designed and understood. The question is particularly relevant in biodiversity hotspots where local communities rely heavily on their natural resources for their livelihoods. Any degradation in wildlife populations threatens not only important and rare species, but also has a direct impact on the local quality of life of the communities that rely on them. If local economies and livelihoods are to prosper and grow sustainably and if management strategies are to be well informed and their impacts understood, there is a clear need to better understand the link between conservation and sustainable production in light of climatic changes.

This study aims to develop a bio-economic model to understand how climate change and other drivers impact biodiversity loss in West Africa.

Conferences

• Farming and sustainable environments, Royal Geographical Society, February 2010.
• Student Conference for Conservation Science, Cambridge University, Cambridge, March 2010.
• Climate change adaptation and the international year of biodoversity, Cambridge Conservation Forum, June 2010.
• Society of Conservation Biology, New Zealand, December 2011

Presentations and Posters

• Dynamics of a bushmeat hunting system under social and economic change, UC Berkeley, Lab visit, Spetember 2011.
• Econometric analyses of a bushmeat market in the Ashanti Region, Ghana, DICE, University of Canterbury, Networking workshop, September 2011
• Wildlife hunting and biodiversity. How do hunters respond to economic and environmental change? A West African case study. Poster presentaion, SCB, New Zealand, December 2011.

Media

• Waste Watchers, BBC Wildlife Magazine, February 2011

Brief CV

Present         PhD Student, Imperial College London

2007 – 2009   Senior Consultant for fuel cells and renewable energy technologies, Synnogy Ltd

2006 – 2007   Project Manager, Chimpanzee Conservation Centre, Guinee.

2004 – 2006   Policy Advisor, Defra

2003 – 2004   MSc Environmental Science and Technology, Imperial College

1999 – 2002   BSc Physics, Bristol University