EcoStrategist

  From protecting ecosystems and changing behaviors to rethinking how we measure success For more than 25 + years, I have dedicated my professional life to conservation. I spent over two decades working with NGOs, primarily focused on protecting species, conserving ecosystems, and addressing the threats driving biodiversity loss. Over the last four years, my journey has taken me into the private sector, working in nature-based carbon projects, with a particular focus on community strategies. Moving between these two worlds has given me a different perspective on a question that has followed me throughout my career: How do we really know that our conservation efforts are making a difference? I have seen projects celebrate the number of people trained, workshops delivered, hectares covered, or communities engaged. I have also seen the growing emphasis on rigorous measurement and verification in carbon markets, where environmental claims must be supported by evidence. Both exp...

Confessions of a conservationist who thought saving nature was mostly about understanding nature. Like many conservationists, I started my career believing that conservation was fundamentally about nature. I was trained as a biologist. I loved fieldwork, collecting data, observing species, understanding ecosystems, and trying to make sense of the extraordinary complexity of the natural world. There was something wonderfully straightforward about it. You went into the field, asked scientific questions, collected evidence, analyzed your findings, and hopefully contributed a little more knowledge to help protect the planet. Of course, nature was never simple. But at least the questions seemed clear. Where are the species? What threatens them? How do ecosystems function? What can science tell us about protecting them? I genuinely believed that if we understood nature well enough, we could figure out how to conserve it. And then, somewhere along the way, people happened. The unexpected care...

  It's not only the manager. It's also the system around them. My last post on leadership in conservation got far more responses than I expected. Many of you described the same thing: someone brilliant at their technical work gets promoted, suddenly has a team to lead, and is quietly expected to figure the rest out. Several people from development organizations wrote to say, "This is us too." I still believe we need to invest far more in leadership development. But since then I've been sitting with an uncomfortable thought: what if training is only half the answer? We can teach someone to give feedback, delegate, and handle conflict. Then we send them back into an organization where decisions are unclear, workloads are unrealistic, poor behavior goes unchallenged, and they have little authority over the things they're responsible for. And we're surprised when leadership still feels so hard. Good managers can struggle inside bad systems Picture a ...

There is something I have been thinking about for a while. In conservation, we invest heavily in technical expertise. We train people to understand biodiversity, restoration, carbon, community development, safeguards, monitoring frameworks, and increasingly complex standards. And we should, but somewhere along the way, many of our best technical experts become managers. And that is where things get interesting. One day, you are valued because you are excellent at your technical work. Then suddenly, your job changes. You are no longer responsible only for solving technical problems. You are responsible for people. You need to motivate teams, manage conflict, delegate, give difficult feedback, navigate budgets, build trust with communities, manage donor expectations, and make decisions with incomplete information. The technical expertise that made you successful is suddenly only part of the job. Yet we often behave as if leadership will simply appear. As if being a brilliant conservation...

 As many of you already know, this blog has always been my space to think out loud, a place for ideas, learnings, the things that stick with me long after they happen. Today's post is more personal than usual, and harder to write. Last week my son was diagnosed with leishmaniasis, and the days that followed taught me more about our public health system than I ever wanted to learn. For those who don't know it, leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease spread by the bite of a tiny sandfly. It's not rare here,   Ecuador has reported it for years, mostly in cases quietly absorbed by public hospitals and rarely discussed anywhere else. The World Health Organization classifies it as a “neglected tropical disease,” a category that exists specifically for illnesses that strike the world's poorest communities and never quite make it onto anyone's priority list. Somewhere between 700,000 and a million new cases appear worldwide every year, and most of them, like ours, happen far...

Hay algo profundamente valioso en querer entender cómo funciona la naturaleza. Durante siglos, biólogos y ecólogos se han dedicado a observar, describir y tratar de comprender la enorme diversidad de formas de vida que nos rodean. Gracias a esa curiosidad conocemos especies que antes eran invisibles para nosotros, entendemos relaciones ecológicas extraordinariamente complejas y hemos descubierto procesos que sostienen ecosistemas enteros. Muchas veces, además, los conocimientos que hoy resultan fundamentales para la conservación comenzaron con una pregunta que no pretendía resolver ningún problema inmediato. Por eso, defender una ciencia orientada a la conservación no significa cuestionar el valor de la investigación básica. Al contrario: significa reconocer que nuestro conocimiento sobre la biodiversidad se construye poco a poco, gracias al trabajo acumulado de personas que estudian especies, poblaciones, ecosistemas, genes, comportamientos, interacciones y procesos ecológicos. ...