Rosamunde Almond is a Visiting Researcher at CSER and in April 2024, she will join the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge as Deputy Head of Science.
A ‘red’ thread’ running through her career as a conservation scientist has been to inspire change with science and she has lead, managed and coordinated fascinating and challenging projects with people from all over the world. As Editor-in-Chief of the WWF Living Planet Report in 2020 and 2022, she led the production of WWF’s flagship publication on the state of the world and our impact upon it and she worked closely with the communications team to launch them in 110 countries. Together with researchers from 56 institutions, she was a co-author on a pioneering Nature paper in 2020 which used cutting-edge models and scenarios to identified a range of demand-side, supply-side, and conservation actions which have the potential to ‘bend the curve’ of biodiversity loss.
For the last 6 years, Rosamunde has worked at WWF-Netherlands as one of the founding members of a new Science and Impact Programme, developing new proposals and catalysing strategic research partnerships that bridge policy, research and practice. Her previous roles as Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment and within the Cambridge Conservation Initiative mean she has an excellent bird’s eye view of conservation and sustainability research within and beyond the University.
While she is a Visitor at CSER, Rosamunde will be working with SJ and researchers across CSER to help develop research proposals related to environmental risk. For example, what actions would be needed to lead to extreme outcomes for biodiversity by 2050, by 2100? These could be positive, such as doubling the amount we have now. Changes in biodiversity could also be negative, for example if our current rate of loss increases. How extreme would our actions have to be to reach those outcomes? Can these extreme scenarios help us to think about how to prioritise actions or highlight those that could can have greater potential to change the trajectory of biodiversity? Over the next year, she is looking forward to exploring these ideas, learning about the ‘world’ of existential risk, and identifying potential opportunities for collaboration related to environmental risk and CSER’s work more generally.