Conservation is often a hard sell. However, the business of conservation has a heft that appeals to both governments and people looking for pathways out of poverty in Africa.
Yves Vanderhaeghen
Climate change biologist Dr Shannon Conradie. Winner of the 2024 $150 000 JWO research grant.
An elephant moves across a boundary. On one side, in Etosha National Park for example, it’s an asset. But then, as it steps over what may sometimes be an imaginary boundary, it’s a cost.
Dr Winnie Kiiru doesn’t go so far as to say that researchers from Europe or America are killing Africans. But if scientists asked the right questions, or stretched their focus a bit, lives could perhaps be saved, she argues.
Professor Kevin Gaston: “our personalised ecologies are in decline”.
Andre Crawford-Brunt’s vision is to build the “Netflix of nature”.
Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha. This unlikely champion of resilience is an unglamorous, unadventurous butterfly that normally travels less than a few hundred metres in its two-week life.
Dr Camille Parmesan is a climate change researcher who knows what it feels like to have one’s habitat wither.
His name’s Bond, William Bond, and he says it’s time to put fire to the veld. To save it.
Keep an eye on the lions; watch where the elephants are, where the people are; track the poachers; count the nesting vultures.
That’s a tall order far on the veld, or deep in a vast nature reserve, where constraints of distance, cost, connectivity and a shortage of hands make conservation a thorny task at the best of times.