Managing The Threats To Biodiversity

For decades environmental groups, Non Government Organizations and scores of government agencies have been managing the threats to biodiversity. We often hear of the projects to save the elephants or the pandas and now huge projects seek to clean the ocean from millions of tons of plastic pollution.

However there are many projects small and large that we don’t hear about. Work is quietly being done on the ground to save whole ecosystems or to protect one last remaining plant or animal. Here to talk about some of these project is our guest, who just happens to be my daughter, is Dr. Kina Murphy.

Dr. Murphy holds a Ph.D. in Biology/Ecology that focuses on mitigating the impacts of human land-use change on biodiversity and a Masters in Community and Regional Planning with a focus on natural resource management. She has over twenty-years of experience working throughout Africa, Asia and North America where she has focused on biodiversity monitoring, market-based approaches to conservation and community-based conservation planning and policy. Her other strengths include biodiversity offsets and mitigation planning for extractive industries and a detailed understanding of the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Program.

Currently, Dr. Murphy is the Africa Strategy Development Lead for the Campaign for Nature where she is responsible for helping the Campaign for Nature (CfN) to achieve it’s three overarching campaign goals of: 1) Increasing global targets for terrestrial and marine protected areas under the 2020-2030 strategic plan for the Convention on Biological Diversity to at least 30% by 2030, 2) Securing a minimum of an additional $1B/year in funding commitments for management of protected areas in developing countries to accompany increased protected area targets; and 3) Approaching biodiversity conservation in a way that fully integrates and respects Indigenous leadership and Indigenous rights.

Managing the threats to biodiversity is a formidable task, which Dr. Murphy has dedicated her life to achieving.