Prof E.J. Milner-Gulland & Prof Sir Charles Godfray in conversation: "Resetting our relationship with nature in a post-COVID world"

Past Event

Date
 22 September 2020, 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Location
 Online

Event Recording:

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected both wildlife and our relationship to it.

This includes calls to ban the wildlife trade, highlighting the relationship between conservation and public health, and what became of the “2020 biodiversity super-year”.

Join Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland, Lead Researcher of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade and Professor Sir Charles Godfray, Director of the Oxford Martin School as they discuss how wider economic shocks have affected the wildlife trade, particularly in Africa, and how to fulfil the bold targets for nature recovery (in the UK and globally). And how can Oxford contribute, both practically through its operations and through research and educational activities.

To register and watch this talk live: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/nature-in-a-post-covid

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.

Professor Milner Gulland by John Cairns 13 4 17 40 SM e1531840099246

Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland
Lead Researcher, Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade & Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity

Before joining the University of Oxford in November 2015, E.J. was Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London for 15 years, before which she held positions in Resource Economics and Mathematical Ecology at Oxford, Imperial and Warwick Universities.

She has a particular interest in developing and applying methods for understanding and predicting human behaviour in the context of local resource use in developing countries, and improving the effectiveness of incentive-based mechanisms such as payment for ecosystems services and biodiversity offsetting, in the marine and terrestrial realms.

She also works on the illegal wildlife trade and is interested in designing, monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions in order to improve their effectiveness.

She is passionate about the conservation ecology of the saiga antelope in Central Asia, and co-founded the Saiga Conservation Alliance in 2006.

Professor Milner-Gulland's research group is strongly interdisciplinary and has a wide range of research interests within conservation science. Its ethos is to ensure that all the research they do addresses issues identified by practitioners, and is carried out collaboratively with end-users.

The group’s research falls within three broad themes: understanding natural resource users; exploring social-ecological systems; managing human-nature interactions. The first theme addresses the drivers and motivations behind human behaviour towards the environment, the second theme addresses the feedbacks between individual behaviour and the wider social and ecological system within which they are embedded, and the third theme addresses how best to design, implement and evaluate interventions to alter human behaviour and hence slow the rate of biodiversity loss.

EJ is also an Official Fellow and Theme Lead for Environmental Change at Oxford’s newest graduate college, Reuben College.

Charles Godfray

Professor Sir Charles Godfray
Director, Oxford Martin School

Professor Sir Charles Godfray was appointed Director of the Oxford Martin School on 1 February 2018.

Professor Godfray is a world-leading population biologist with broad interests in the environmental sciences and has published in fundamental and applied areas of ecology, evolution and epidemiology. He is interested in how the global food system will need to change and adapt to the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, and in particular in the concept of sustainable intensification, and the relationship between food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity. In 2017 he was knighted for services to scientific research and for scientific advice to government.

As well as leading the School, Professor Godfray is also a lead researcher of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food and the Oxford Martin Restatements project, a new approach to providing succinct summaries of scientific evidence around highly contentious topics.