TOPICS
Environment
Conservation
Globalisation
Ecology
LANGUAGES SPOKEN
English
Julian Caldecott
Dr Julian Caldecott is a world renowned ecologist and conservationist.
A wildlife enthusiast since childhood and a conservation professional since the mid-1980s, when he completed his PhD at Cambridge on the ecology of tropical rainforest monkeys. Since then Julian has lived and worked all over the Malay Archipelago (Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines), and in Sri Lanka and Nigeria, with shorter missions to other parts of Asia and Africa, and to Central and South America. Apart from wildlife studies (such as on elephants, apes, bearded pigs and Sumatran rhinos), most of his work has been about finding ways to conserve and restore national parks, ecosystems and biodiversity, and building public understanding of the values of nature.
His books include Hunting and Wildlife Management in Sarawak, Designing Conservation Projects, the World Atlas of Great Apes (foreword by Kofi Annan) and their Conservation. His latest book Water: Life in Every Drop (foreword by Zac Goldsmith)was published in 2007, which is about the ecology of the global water crisis.
In 2003-2005, he led a division at the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), responsible for global assessment of ecosystem status and threats. Then he joined the UNEP Tsunami Disaster Task Force to coordinate its work in Sri Lanka, and afterwards worked with UNEP’s Disaster Management Branch on environmental restoration and risk reduction in the Indian Ocean region.
His next mission is to Bangladesh, where he’ll be designing EC projects on disaster risk reduction and researching a book on human population issues and climate change.
With this background and reputation, Julian can speak with authority on a wide range of topics related to the environment.
• the current worldwide mass extinction of wild species and what we can do to reduce its rate
• the implications of climate change for ecosystems and the people who depend upon them, including vulnerabilities to floods, droughts, and the spread of fires, deserts and diseases;
• the escalation in environmental and weather-related disaster risk, and how to reduce it while adapting to changing conditions;
• the laws, policies and actions that governments and ordinary people can use to overcome particular environmental challenges, from renewable energy and carbon storage to waste management and sustainable fisheries;
• the ways in which businesses can build and maintain trust among their customers that they are part of the solution to environmental problems rather than the opposite, which will soon be a key factor in commercial viability.