NCSAF Lunch
April 23, 2008

World Wildlife Fund
1250 Twenty-Fourth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20090

* Bring your own lunch*

Dr. Taylor Rickets, Director of World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Science Program, will be presenting at our next NCSAF luncheon focusing on WWFs Natural Capital Project (including goals and preliminary research results). As many of us recognize, natural ecosystems support human livelihoods and economies through a variety of ecosystem services (e.g., water purification, carbon storage, crop pollination).  Despite wide recognition of the economic importance of these services, governments and other decision-makers still lack the information and tools to incorporate their value into relevant decisions.  The Natural Capital Project, a new global partnership among WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and Stanford University , is addressing this problem by developing tools to map ecosystem services, estimate their value, and craft policies and financial mechanisms to reward their conservation.  Working with local scientists and stakeholders, the partnership is using these tools in a set of priority regions for biodiversity, where the goals of conservation and economic development must be advanced together.  Future results will help identify the synergies between biodiversity conservation and economic development when the two are indeed aligned, and to clearly understand the trade-offs when they are not.

More on Dr. Ricketts

Taylor Ricketts is the Director of WWF's Conservation Science Program, where he leads a broad range of scientific activities at WWF, from conducting research on the scientific foundations of conservation to providing technical assistance to conservation programs on the ground.

Taylor's research currently focuses on economic benefits of conservation to people: the "ecosystem services" provided by forests, wetlands, and other natural areas. He served as a Convening Lead Author of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a 5-year, UN-sponsored effort to assess the world's ecosystems and their contribution to human well-being. Taylor is also co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, a partnership among WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and Stanford University map ecosystem services, estimate their value, and use this information to inform and finance conservation investments.

In addition to his work on ecosystem services, Taylor and the science staff collaborate widely to analyze large-scale datasets for insights into (i) why biodiversity is distributed the way it is, (ii) how these patterns relate to those of human threats, and (iii) how this information can improve WWF's conservation work. Taylor started WWF's Kathryn Fuller Science for Nature Fund, which links the worlds of scientific research and practical conservation through post-doctoral fellowships, annual symposia, regular seminars, visiting scholarships, and small grants. He is the author of over 40 scientific publications and has received numerous awards for his work from the Society for Conservation Biology, the National Science Foundation, the Summit Foundation, and others. Taylor received his B.A. in Earth Sciences and Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University.