About me
Photo by Petteri Kokkonen
Who's Julian Caldecott?
I’m an ecologist with a mission to reduce and repair the damage that people do to the biosphere. I do this by designing ways to conserve and restore ecosystems and biodiversity, by building public understanding of the values of nature, and by encouraging and enabling people to increase their resilience to climate change. My efforts have so far contributed to major conservation programmes in Indonesia (protected areas in Siberut, Flores and Central Sulawesi), Malaysia (the Maliau Basin Conservation Area in Sabah, awareness of the value of wild meat harvests and biodiversity in Sarawak and Malaya), the Philippines (in Samar), China (in Hainan), Sri Lanka (parts of the protected area system, and the national wildlife policy) and Nigeria (the Cross River National Park). Major themes in my work include integrating development and conservation, promoting sustainable and equitable use of biodiversity and ecosystems, and exploring ways to finance conservation sustainably. I’ve written several books, including Hunting and Wildlife Management in Sarawak (IUCN, 1988), Designing Conservation Projects (Cambridge, 1996, paperback 2009), and Water: the Causes, Costs and Future of a Global Crisis (Virgin, 2007, paperback 2008, Finnish edition 2009), and I co-edited the World Atlas of Great Apes and their Conservation (California, 2005).
In 2003-2005, I led a division at UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, responsible for global assessment of ecosystem status and threats, and the valuation of ecosystem services. In early 2005, I joined the UNEP Asian Tsunami Disaster Task Force to help assess the impacts of the Great Tsunami in Sri Lanka, and to improve environmental security by restoring mangroves, coral reefs and other coastal ecosystems. In 2006-2007 I was Senior Technical Adviser at the UNEP Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, with special responsibility for environmental restoration in the Indian Ocean region. In recent months I've assessed an EC project on coastal ecosystem conservation in Thailand, the EC-supported ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity in South-east Asia, and the EU-China Biodiversity Programme; I've identified disaster management and climate change adaptation projects for the EC in Bangladesh, prepared desk studies on environmental change in Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Arctic for Living Earth, on REDD in Africa for DFID, and on ecosystems and disaster risk reduction for the ProAct Network, while also writing and editing books for UNEP. In 2009 I joined the Advisory Board of Our Future Planet, a web-based community where citizens can design a new world sustainably inhabited by all its peoples and species. Other OFP advisors include Satish Kumar, Professor Anil Markandya, Mark Gerzon, Professor Frank Morgan, and James Arnold-Baker.
My overall aim is to make the workings of the biosphere clear to all, so that we can understand how and why to start living on the Earth as if we intended to stay.
