Nature Positive
press kit

Harvey Locke is a conservationist, writer, and photographer based in Banff National Park, Canada, where his family has deep roots. He has been at the forefront of several of the biggest ideas in global conservation, working to protect Nature around the world for the last 40 years. He is a co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the Nature Needs Half and Nature Positive movements. As the lead author of the paper that introduced the Nature Positive idea globally, he serves as the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Vice Chair for Nature Positive and is a leader in integrating nature and climate in global policy. 

Johan Rockström is the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam. He is an internationally recognized scientist specializing in global sustainability and Earth resilience. 

Raina Plowright is the Rudolf J. and Katharine L. Steffen Professor at Cornell University and a Cornell Atkinson Scholar at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. A veterinarian, she holds an M.S. in epidemiology and a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis.  

Dan Laffoley joined the Nature Conservancy Council in 1988 after completing his PhD in marine ecology at the University of Exeter. Between 1988 and 1989, he helped establish the major UK marine biodiversity resource survey, the Marine Nature Conservation Review.  

Leroy Little Bear was born and raised on the Blood Indian Reserve (Kainai First Nation), Alberta. Upon returning to his alma mater, he became a founding member of Canada’s first Native American Studies department, serving as a researcher, faculty member, and department chair until his retirement in 1997. He later served as Director of the Harvard University Native American Program and was instrumental in creating the Bachelor of Management in First Nations Governance at the University of Lethbridge. 

Robyn Seetal is a CPA, CA, and an award-winning consultant and Founder of IkTaar Sustainability. She combines her risk management, sustainability, and accounting expertise to create shared value for organizations.

For the last 25 years, Carlos Peres has focused on studying wildlife community ecology in Amazonian forests, the population ecology of key tropical forest resource populations, and the biological criteria for designing large nature reserves. He currently co-directs four ecology and conservation research programs in neotropical forests, which cover the ecology of key forest resources, patterns of vertebrate assemblage structure, the biological dynamics of hyper-disturbed and fragmented forest landscapes, and the biodiversity consequences of land-use change. He has published approximately 470 papers on neotropical forest ecology and conservation. 

Dr. Krithi K. Karanth is the Chief Executive Officer at the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS). She also holds Adjunct Faculty positions at Duke University and the National Centre for Biological Sciences. Dr. Karanth earned a Ph.D. from Duke (2008), a M.E.Sc from Yale (2003), and B.S. and B.A. degrees from the University of Florida (2001), in addition to completing executive education courses at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. 

Lydia Zemke is a researcher and sustainability strategist focused on mobilizing private finance to support nature conservation and ecosystem restoration. Her Ph.D. explored the dynamics of private finance for nature-based solutions in Kenya and Costa Rica, analyzing how public and private actors interact to shape investment in nature. 

Fuwen Wei is a Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Science. His research utilizes state-of-the-art methods based on macro-ecology and micro (molecular, genomic, and metagenomic)-ecology. The primary focus of his work is assessing the past, present, and future status of endangered species in China, with a special emphasis on the giant and red pandas.