Demonstrating ecosystem service values in Africa

I lead the technical and strategic development of BirdLife International’s global scientific work on natural capital and ecosystem services (the concept of valuing nature and its services through the benefits they provide to people) based at the Global Secretariat in Cambridge. This includes providing technical support and training to BirdLife partners to use the Toolkit for Ecosystem Services Site-based Assessment (TESSA), a tool for site-scale ES assessment developed in partnership with other CCI organisations. I coordinate the continued development of TESSA on behalf of the steering committee. I also contribute to the CCI Working Group on Natural Capital and Sustainable Economies which focuses on improving the way in which businesses, governments and civil society understand and incorporate biodiversity values into their processes and decisions. I manage the CCI PRISM project which aims to provide conservation practitioners with simple, accessible methods for evaluating the impact of small-medium conservation projects. I studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, obtained an MSc in Environmental Practice: Biodiversity Conservation in 2008 and have 10+ years’ experience of working in conservation.

As Director of the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme, David oversees the delivery of a programme of work supporting large-scale nature recovery in Europe. After graduating, he worked at University College London exploring landscape-scale impacts of dams and drainage on economy, ecology and society in Tunisia.

David went on to work for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), providing technical advice on links between environment and local livelihoods at a floodplain wetland in northern Nigeria, before completing a PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge.

From 1997 until 2017, David worked at BirdLife International where, as Head of Environment and Sustainable Development, he coordinated the different strands of BirdLife’s environment and sustainable development work and led on cross-cutting issues of conservation and governance, equity, rights, poverty reduction, gender, indigenous peoples, livelihoods and well-being.

I am a Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, where my research focuses on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with meeting human food needs and other land-demanding activities; the costs and benefits of retaining intact ecosystems; and identifying what works in conservation. I collaborate closely with conservation practitioners and with colleagues in other disciplines, including economics and psychology. In my book Wild Hope he argues that cautious, evidence-based optimism is vital in tackling environmental challenges. I helped establish the Student Conference on Conservation Science, the Cambridge Conservation Forum, Earth Optimism, and most recently the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits.

I have worked with over 40 ecosystem service experts to build a manual that guides non-specialists through state-of-the art methods for the rapid assessment of some critical ecosystem services at their site of interest. This toolkit also emphasizes the importance of making the same estimates for the most likely alternative state of the site (say, after conversion to agriculture) so that decision-makers can assess the net consequences of such change. Early field tests in Nepal, Montserrat and the UK have been extremely promising, but have also underscored the immense demand for the tool.
My research interests – besides ecosystem services – range from forest ecology to urban wildlife in respect to diversity and distributions. I am interested in all areas of wildlife-human conflicts and wildlife ecology in human-dominated landscapes, and in the application of my research results to the conservation/management of biological resources.

I am a member of the Animal and Environment Research Group within the Department of Life Sciences.

My current, major research interest is in the development of conceptual and practical approaches to monitoring and evaluating trajectories of ecological change in large-scale wetland restoration projects. With my colleague Pete Stroh, I received research funding for the period 2007-2012 (£220,000) from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, to set up an eco-hydrological monitoring programme and to develop protocols for evaluation of re-naturalised wetland habitats at the Great Fen Project and at the Wicken Fen Vision Project.

I am also involved in a research project that has designed a toolkit for measuring Ecosystem Services at the site scale. This project is led by the University of Cambridge and involves a partnership between the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University, The UNEP-World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Birdlife International and the RSPB, funded through the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) Collaborative fund from April 2010 to May 2011. From May 2011 the project was extended with funding from AXA until 2013 and a recent (June 2012) further grant from the CCI. New partners include the Cambridge Coastal Research Centre and the Tropical Biology Association. I have led development of the water services section of the toolkit. The whole toolkit will become available on a website in late 2012 and covers water services, carbon services, wild harvested goods, cultivated goods and recreation.

Prior to joining Anglia Ruskin University I was a senior research associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge where I jointly coordinated, with Professor Keith Richards, three EU-funded research projects that studied the ecology, hydrology and restoration of European floodplain forests. The most recent of these projects, FLOBAR2 ‘FLOodplain Biodiversity And Restoration’, carried out research on floodplain ecosystems in France, Sweden, Germany, the UK and Canada and its findings are summarised in a document called “The flooded forest”. I have also carried out research on the downstream impacts of dams on riparian and deltaic ecosystems in Canada and Kenya.

Professor Bhaskar Vira FAcSS is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Environmental Sustainability, and Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Geography, a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College.

Trained as an economist, Professor Vira’s research focuses on the political economy of land-use and landscape level strategies, water use and management, forest management, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services and human well-being, with a specific focus on South Asia. He works with a number of PhD students and early-career researchers on his broad interests in the political economy of environment and development, and has collaborations with colleagues in both academic and non-academic institutions in South Asia and around the world. Professor Vira is currently leading a major initiative on Decent Work and Youth Livelihoods. He has led large-scale applied research projects that involve interdisciplinary conversations across the natural and social services, and contributes regularly to policy advisory processes across the science-policy interface.

I lead the new ‘people conservation science’ team at RSPB’s Centre for Conservation Science, monitoring and understanding the human side of conservation issues, testing solutions to problems and evaluating whether actions work.  The team has a particular interest in measuring and valuing nature’s contributions to people, in particular natural climate solutions and sustainable agriculture, and understanding the roles of nudges, perceptions, attitudes and connection to nature for influencing behaviour change.