A ground-breaking professorship that will unify research into how to tackle the Earth’s waning biological diversity is to be created at the University of Cambridge.
A ground-breaking professorship that will unify research into how to tackle the Earth’s waning biological diversity is to be created at the University of Cambridge.
Cambridge is the ideal place to bring together the social and natural sciences to look at conservation."
Jamie James
A ground-breaking professorship that will unify research into how to tackle the Earth’s waning biological diversity is to be created at the University of Cambridge.
The Moran Professorship of Conservation and Development will draw together the work of world-leading academics from both the social and natural sciences in an effort to find inter-disciplinary solutions to major environmental problems.
Professor Bill Adams, who will assume the new title in October, will focus in particular on the often-neglected social causes that lie behind environmental threats. He will also lead research into the pressures and social factors that influence conservation practice and policy.
The post has been made possible by a £2 million donation from the Hon. James (Jamie) and Jane Wilson (pictured). It is named in honour of Mr Wilson's father, Lord Moran, who is a committed conservationist.
Conservationists are usually trained in either the natural or social sciences, and work in these two disciplines is rarely well integrated in the development of conservation policy. The majority of the world's biodiversity exists outside protected areas, and if it is to survive through the 21st century, the interactions between people and the natural environment need to be understood. Moreover, people live and work, legally or illegally, in more than half the world's protected areas. Whether the issue is elephants crop-raiding on poor farmers' farms in Kenya, industrial palm oil plantations replacing rain forest, or habitat restoration in the English countryside, the economic and the political are tightly linked. Conservation is a social as well as a biological problem.
The thinking behind the Moran Professorship is that biological diversity can only be protected if policies take full account of the values, economics and political systems of different societies. Senior academic leadership is needed to develop that sort of all-embracing approach to conservation problems.
Lord Moran, a wartime student at Cambridge and a former member of the British Foreign Service, has had a lifetime interest in conservation and the environment. Jamie and Jane Wilson are both Cambridge graduates, and now live in the United States. They became interested in conservation issues through extensive travels in the developing world, particularly Madagascar, where they were introduced to the local conservation community by the University's Vice-Chancellor, Alison Richard, who maintains a research project there.
"Cambridge is the ideal place to bring together the social and natural sciences to look at conservation," Jamie said. "It has a critical mass of expertise across all the relevant disciplines and is well-placed to make a real difference to the quality of conservation efforts in the field, in governments, in other institutions and in the public mind.
"The University is already in the vanguard of both conservation science and the social sciences and we are confident this gift will help it to bring both together in important ways. Environmental challenges call for innovative and intelligent solutions. Cambridge provides this creativity and excellence."
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