Speakers and panelists

Welcome by Rowena Young, Director of the Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship

Panel Chair:
Professor David Macdonald (University of Oxford)

Panel:
Professor Bill Adams (University of Cambridge),
Dr Paul Jepson (OUCE),
Dr Steve Jennings (Oxfam)

Speaker

Dr Dieter Hoffman (RSPB)

Dieter has a degree and PhD in Agricultural Sciences of the University of Goettingen, Germany and a MSc in Ecology of the University College of Bangor, Wales. He was based for some 10 years in various countries in Africa, initially working in agricultural research, then as Country Director for BirdLife International in Morocco. Since 1996 he heads the RSPB's Global Programmes Department and is responsible for the Society's work outside Europe. This involves work in some 10 countries in Africa, 5 countries in Asia, the Midldle East, and the UK Overseas Territories. Since the beginning, Dieter has been at the forefront of the RSPB's involvement of groundbreaking work in large scale conservation projects in Sierra Leone and Sumatra.

Panel

Chair: Professor David Macdonald (University of Oxford)

Professor in wildlife conservation in the department of Zoology at Oxford University. He is the director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). He is also A.D. White Professor at Cornell University. Professor Macdonald is the Chair of DEFRA's Darwin Advisory Committee and Chair of the IUCN/SSC Canid Specialist Group. He is also Vice-President of the RSPCA and the Wildlife Trust and on the Council of the Zoological Society of London and of English Nature.

Professor Bill Adams (University of Cambridge)

Professor of Conservation and Development and Fellow of Downing College. Bill Adams is Professor of Conservation and Development in the Department of Geography in Cambridge. He primarily teaches about environment and development and the history of environmentalism. Bill has an M.Sc. in conservation, and a Ph.D. on the downstream environmental impacts of dams. He has studied various aspects of sustainable development, and especially the impacts of large-scale projects and programmes. He is currently working on the social dimensions of conservation, the historical development of protected area policy and the challenge of ecological restoration. He is the author of a number of books on nature conservation including Future Nature: a vision for conservation (Earthscan 2003) and Against Extinction (Earthscan, 2004). Bill is a trustee of Flora and Fauna International.

Dr Paul Jepson (OUCE)

Dr Paul Jepson holds senior research fellowships with the Environmental Change Institute and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and teaches a core module on protected areas on Oxford’s MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management. He established and managed the BirdLife International - Indonesia Programme (1991-1997) and was awarded his doctorate from Oxford in 2001 for a thesis on protected area policy in Indonesia. He has visited Sumatra more than 15 times since 1997 to advise and assess conservation projects and is currently researching broader questions of NGO accountability, governance and legitimacy. He publishes widely on conservation policy, trends and history. See website.

Dr Steve Jennings (Oxfam)

Dr Steve Jennings was educated at Cambridge and Aberdeen. He completed his doctorate in tropical rain forest ecology at the University of Oxford in 1997. Remaining at Oxford, he continued his research on the ecology of the Brazilian Amazon, and published widely on rainforest ecology, conservation and forest management. He then became a natural resource management consultant with ProForest. During this time, he oversaw, amongst other things, the development of the concept of High Conservation Value Forest from an idea that many people found interesting but few understood, to one that is today being applied to achieve conservation benefits in over 20 countries. He now works as a Global Livelihoods Adviser with Oxfam GB, with a specific interest on the tsunami-affected countries.