WWF's Kathryn Fuller Science for Nature Seminar Series: March 12, 2009

World Wildlife Fund’s Kathryn Fuller Science for Nature Seminar Series

Dr. Dan Nepstad
Chief Program Officer, Environmental Conservation Programs
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

Date: March 12th, 2009

Time: 4:30-5:30pm (lecture); 5:30-6:30pm (reception)

Admission: FREE!!

Registration: http://www.worldwildlife.org/science/fellowships/fuller/item1816.html

Location: World Wildlife Fund Headquarters
1250 24th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20037

Towards a global framework for environmental conservation
The environmental conservation movement has won many important battles, but it is losing the war. The capacity of the Earth to sustain life is diminishing progressively through the depletion of fisheries and forests, climatic disruption, soil degradation, chemical contamination, and the destruction of native ecosystems. The challenge of environmental conservation is to manage the Earth in its entirety. The sum of environmental conservation efforts worldwide must be sufficient to arrest and reverse the progressive erosion of Earth's capacity to sustain life. Anything less is failure. For example, the land crisis will only be resolved in the context of a global framework within which market forces and policies become aligned to reconcile competing needs for food, fiber, fuel, and ecosystem services. Some reflections on what this framework might look like will be presented.

Abbreviated Biography
Dr. Daniel Nepstad is the Chief Program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Environmental Conservation Program, which includes the Andes-Amazon Initiative, the Conservation International Commitment, the Marine Conservation Initiative and the Wild Salmon Ecosystems Initiative. Prior to his work at the Moore Foundation he served as a scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) for 18 years. A tropical forest ecologist, Dan has studied tropical forests and strategies for their conservation for the last 24 years, and he has published more than 110 scientific papers and several books on the Amazon. His research includes the Amazon forest “tipping point,” the analysis of public policies to conserve the Amazon’s natural resources, the prediction and simulation of future trends of Amazon land use, the “taming” of agroindustry, and the development of carbon markets to reduce deforestation within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In 1995, he co-founded the Brazil-based Amazon Institute of Environmental Studies (Instituto de Pesquisas Ambientais da Amazonia), now the largest non-governmental research institution in Amazonia. In recognition and support of this application of science to public affairs in Brazil, Dan was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment in 1994.

Dan has a Ph.D. from Yale University, an M.S. from Michigan State University, and a B.A. from Kalamazoo College.