ICCS & Covid-19

Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science (ICCS).
E.J. Milner-Gulland is Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford. Previously she was Professor of Conservation Science at Imperial College London, and she has also held lectureships in Resource Economics and Mathematical Ecology. Her PhD, at Imperial College London, was on the wildlife trade, with a focus on ivory, rhino horn and saiga antelopes. Her research group, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, undertakes a wide range of research, outreach and engagement projects, on five continents and in both marine and terrestrial settings. These include developing and applying methods for understanding, predicting, and influencing human behaviour in the context of local resource use in developing countries, and working with businesses to improve their environmental and social sustainability. Her team also works on controlling the illegal trade in wildlife and on designing, monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions in order to improve their effectiveness. She aims to ensure that all the research in her group is addressing issues identified by practitioners, and is carried out collaboratively with end-users, and builds the capacity of young conservationists, particularly in developing countries. She is the founder and chair of the Saiga Conservation Alliance and has launched a number of initiatives which aim to change the real-world conversation around conservation, including the Conservation Hierarchy approach to meeting a global vision of restoring nature and the Conservation Optimism movement. She is the Chair of the UK Government's Darwin Expert Committee and a Trustee of WWF-UK

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

Since an undergraduate project on orchids taught me about the huge lengths that fanatical 19th century orchid collectors would go to to get rare plants, I have been interested in the reasons why people choose to collect, trade and buy wildlife products. This led to me study the collection of plants in Cambodia for my MSc dissertation, and the use of the internet by traders and buyers in the international orchid trade for my PhD.

As well as academic research I have also worked for conservation organisations for several years in a range of roles, including reviewing grant applications, working on FFI Global Trees Campaign projects for threatened tree species, and analysing the UNEP-WCMC CITES Trade Database to inform policy makers.

I am an inter-disciplinary Conservation Scientist interested in wildlife trade and use, its sustainability, governance, and economics, including human behaviour, and pangolins and their conservation.

I completed my PhD on reforming the CITES Convention, at DICE, University of Kent, UK in 2014.

I subsequently worked for the IUCN Secretariat where I led the organisation’s contribution to CITES and broader illegal wildlife trade work, prior to joining the University of Oxford. In 2012, I re-formed the IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group and served as Chair of the group until early 2021.

While my initial degree was in Marine and Environmental Biology, my PhD focussed on the social and economic uses of wild meat (wildlife used primary for food) by local communities in Gabon, and my experiences in Gabon led my interests to shift quickly from ecology towards people and their governance of natural resources. Following my PhD I worked for UNEP-WCMC, in the Protected Areas (PA) programme, where I investigated the costs and benefits of PAs on local livelihoods, and the impact of different elements of PA management on PA effectiveness. I then completed a 3-year post-doc with the Governance Group of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, where I conducted further field studies on wildmeat use by local communities in Gabon, and desk-studies of the effectiveness of different local-level strategies aiming to increase the sustainability of wildmeat use. After my post-doc I moved to Cambodia for a few years, during which time I conducted research on wildmeat use by local communities in the Cardamom mountains, as part of a project with FFI. I currently work as a Research Fellow with ICCS and with the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

My career has spanned the third sector, advocacy and policy and academic sectors, from establishing an environmental and skills-based training programme for vulnerable 16-25-year olds in a grass-roots NGO in London; to researching and advocating for sustainable and equitable agricultural practices across sub-Saharan Africa; to exploring the impacts of protected area creation on rural livelihoods in Cambodia; to drawing on local ecological knowledge to monitor species populations and their threats in Cameroon; and, most recently, to co-designing locally-managed natural resource monitoring programmes with indigenous peoples and local communities in Kenya and Vietnam.

I’ve long been fascinated by the inextricable link between people and nature, and believed that the voices and knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities should play a central role in developing conservation policy and practice. I enjoy researching and developing robust, cost-effective and ethical approaches to monitoring biodiversity in challenging environments, and for engaging with indigenous peoples and local communities. I love drawing on interdisciplinary methods to research socio-ecological systems, and translating research into outputs that inform conservation practice and policy.