Events
What's on in conservation
April 2021

CCI Conservation Seminar: Food system resilience through the lens of fisheries
Prof Daniel Rubenstein from Princeton University presents this week’s seminar. Fisheries provide food for a large part of humanity, often with heavy environmental footprints. Couplings of fishing effort across spatial scales and conflicts among different types of fishers have reduced stocks of some species, but not others, thus increasing the fragility of many fishery supply…

Indigenous Lifeways for a Flourishing Planet
On the eve of Earth Day, the latest in Synchronicity Earth’s Deeper Thinking Series, chaired by Synchronicity Earth founders Jessica and Adam Sweidan, explores how our understanding of flourishing diversity, informed by indigenous knowledge, culture and lifeways, can be our lodestar to help guide us towards a way of living that is more in harmony with…

The Garden Jungle – how to save our insects
We are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event, with extinctions occurring faster than at any time in the last 65 million years. ‘Bioabundance’ is in rapid decline, with recent studies showing that insects in particular seem to be disappearing fast. For example, recent evidence from Germany found that the biomass of flying…

300 years of fieldwork – the plants of Cambridgeshire (and the World) in one room!
Containing an estimated 1.1 million plant specimens and dating back at least to the early 1700s, the Cambridge University Herbarium has received little research attention in recent years. Dr Lauren Gardiner will reveal some of the treasures being discovered inside this scientifically and historically important collection – including Darwin specimens and the herbarium of Oliver…

What a Waste: Circular food systems and sustainable diets
An #AnnualFoodAgenda Event, hosted by the University of Cambridge, Global Food Security IRC and Cambridge Infectious Diseases IRC. In the UK the average family of four could save just over £60 per month by reducing their food waste. (SOURCE: wrap.org.uk) Globally, one-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted. (SOURCE: UNFAO ) Food waste is a massive global…
May 2021

CCI Conservation Seminar: Developing and applying quantitative, interdisciplinary science to understand the human dimensions of conservation
We are joined for this week’s seminar by Dr Robin Naidoo from WWF. “The science and practice of conservation has morphed from an ecological endeavour to one that recognizes the fundamental role that people play in shaping its success or failure. Here, I will discuss how quantitative, interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as economics, ecology,…

How to use evidence to improve biodiversity impact mitigation
Join the Conservation Evidence team at the University of Cambridge for our webinar to find out how evidence-based biodiversity mitigation actions can improve the performance of your company or organization. We’ll take you through an introduction to evidence-based decision making, examples of how it can improve practice, and outline the resources we have developed that can help…

CCI Conservation Seminar – Reimaging conservation today: Decolonization, indigenous sovereignty and collaboration
Prof Paige West from Columbia University is this week’s speaker. “Today conservation sits at a crossroads. Scholars and practitioners can either continue down the deeply historic paths of protection, preservation, and management, and the epistemic divides that these practices are based on, or they can step back and listen to the communities who live with…

Can biodiversity make children happy?
Kate Howlett, a PhD student at the Museum of Zoology, Cambridge, will talk about her research into the importance of green space in UK primary schools. She will explore the benefits of exposure to biodiversity and green space for our health and wellbeing, including how this can reduce social health inequalities, and how this could…
June 2021

CCI Conservation Seminar: AI for wildlife conservation
This week, Prof Milind Tambe from Harvard University presents the conservation seminar. “With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. In this talk, I will focus on two challenges: preventing poaching and preventing human-wildlife conflicts, presenting results from collaborations in…