In April 2017 the Conservation Optimism summit played host to a very special session in London, which brought together representatives from business, NGOs and universities to discuss the emerging field of business & biodiversity. Our session focused on biodiversity accounting (e.g., the development of biodiversity metrics for business) and disclosure (e.g., communicating biodiversity…

I had the privilege to spend the first quarter of 2017 as Biodiversity Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science (ICCS), a centre of excellence in conservation research within the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. Supported by Merton College and Oxford University, the fellowship provides one mid-career researcher/practitioner every term, the opportunity…

An old idiom goes “one picture is worth 1000 words”, and it took the ingenuity of a mad analyst, Dr. James McQuivey from Forrester Research, to calculate that a “one minute video is worth 1.8 million words”.

As a conservation activist working in rural African communities, I…

International Women’s Day was a bit of a relational minefield for me this year.  Whilst I openly support feminist ideals, and am marginally vocal in the fight for parity in science and conservation, I’ve recently come to a bit of a realisation.

I am a female misogynist.

I was made aware of this by my friend of nearly…

At the global scale, conservation research does not always influence conservation action. Partly because of this, more and more species are becoming extinct. In the context of the uncertain consequences of…

Lion bones have now joined elephant ivory and rhino horn as contentious commodities in the wildlife trade policy arena. This follows revelations of a growing export market of bones from deceased captive-bred lions from South Africa to Southeast Asia – and sharply divided opinions over how policy-makers should respond to this. To date, this trade has been both legal and sustainable, but raises…