Russell A. Mittermeier is
currently Chief Conservation Officer of Global Wildlife Conservation. Prior to this position, he served for three
years as Executive Vice Chair at Conservation International and as President of
that organization from 1989 to 2014. Named
a “Hero for the Planet” by TIME magazine,
Mittermeier is regarded as a world leader in the field of biodiversity and
tropical forest conservation. Trained as
a primatologist and herpetologist, he has traveled widely in 169 countries on
seven continents, and has conducted field work in more than 30 −
focusing
particularly on Amazonia (especially Brazil and Suriname), the Atlantic forest
region of Brazil, and Madagascar.
The scope of his activities
goes way beyond his position at Conservation International. Since 1977, Mittermeier has served as
Chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group, and
he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Species Survival Commission
since 1982. Prior to working for
Conservation International, he spent 11 years at World Wildlife Fund − U.S. (1978−1989), starting as Director of its
Primate Program and ending up as Vice-President for Science. He also served as an IUCN Regional Councillor
for the period 2004−2012, was elected as one of IUCN’s four
Vice-Presidents for the period 2009−2012, and then was elected a
lifetime Honorary IUCN Member in 2012. In
addition, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook since 1978 (and received an Honorary Doctorate there in 2007), a
Research Associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University
for more than two decades, and President of the Margot Marsh Biodiversity
Foundation since 1996. Most recently, he
was instrumental in the creation of the €25 million Mohamed bin Zayed
Species Conservation Fund, a new species-focused fund based in Abu Dhabi, and
serves as one of only two international board members.
Mittermeier has been particularly
influential in the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil, where he has worked since
1971, and in Madagascar, where he first began work in 1984. Another focus has been South America’s Guiana
Shield region, the most pristine rain forest area left on Earth, where he began
working in 1975. His vision for
conservation in the Guianas − conserving over 100 million
hectares of pristine forest from Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, the
northernmost part of Brazilian Amazonia, and Venezuela − has been widely praised.
Having worked in the region for 42 years, he has been able to win allies in
many sectors, from heads-of-state to indigenous leaders, and has won a place
for biodiversity conservation in government and community decision-making.
In 1986, Mittermeier created
the concept of “Megadiversity Countries”, which recognizes that just 18 nations
are responsible for more than two-thirds of all biodiversity − terrestrial, freshwater, and
marine −
a concept that has been picked up by several of the nations in this
category. It also led to the independent
creation of a “Like-minded Group of Megadiverse Countries” within the
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
At about the same time, he came up with the concept of “Major Tropical
Wilderness Areas”, which later became known as “High Biodiversity Wilderness
Areas. He also has been the major
proponent of the “Biodiversity Hotspots” concept, which was created by British
ecologist Norman Myers in 1988 and immediately adopted by Mittermeier. Myers first published on 10 Hotspots, and
then 18. Based on research conducted by
Mittermeier and colleagues, the total has now grown to 36.
Over the course of his career,
Mittermeier’s work has taken him to many different tropical rain forests around
the world, to the point that he has now almost certainly been to more of these
forests than anyone else ever.
Mittermeier has been
particularly interested in the discovery and description of species new to
science. He has described a total of 19 new species (three
turtles, seven lemurs, two tarsiers, and seven monkeys) and has eight species
named in his honor (three frogs, a lizard, two lemurs, a saki monkey, and an
ant).
More recently, he has become
involved in the climate change issue, in particular highlighting the importance
of tropical forests in mitigating climate change. He has helped to promote the concept of
“avoided deforestation” (aka REDD − Reduction in Emissions from
Deforestation and Degradation), and particularly the very significant role of
the High Forest Cover Low Deforestation Rate (HFLD) countries such as Suriname
and Guyana, which helped to add the “+” to REDD”.
Since 2008, Mittermeier has
been active in promoting Conservation International’s new mission, focused on
demonstrating that “People Need Nature to Thrive”. The essence of this mission is that natural
capital needs to be central to long-term sustainable development, and that
nature is essential in ensuring human well-being.
He
has also been a leader in promoting species-focused ecotourism, particularly
primate-watching and primate life-listing, based on the very successful model
of the bird-watching community. To
facilitate this, he launched a Tropical Field Guide Series and a Pocket Guide
Series focused heavily on primates, but including a number of other species
groups as well. The most recent
publications to emerge in the Tropical Field Guide Series are Lemurs of Madagascar, 3rd Edition (2010),
and Primates of West Africa (2011), with a French edition of the former, Lémuriens de Madagascar, published
in June 2014. His own primate life-list, now totaling more than 350 species, is
almost certainly the largest in the world, and serves as a baseline for other
primate life-listers.
In addition, Mittermeier has
had a lifelong interest in tribal peoples, and has worked with many different
communities, from the Trio of southern Suriname and the Saramaccaner, Matawai, and
Aucaner Maroons of central Suriname to the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon, and
has engaged them in a variety of different conservation endeavors. He has also published on the strong
connections between biodiversity and human cultural diversity, demonstrating
how strongly the highest priority areas for each overlap.
Among the many honors
he has received are the San Diego Zoological Society’s Gold Medal (1988), the
Order of the Golden Ark of The Netherlands, from Prince Bernhard (1995), the
Cincinnati Zoo Wildlife Conservation Award (1997), the Brazilian Muriqui Prize
(1997), the Grand Sash and Order of the Yellow Star, Republic of Suriname, from
President Jules Wijdenbosch (1998), the Order of the Southern Cross, from President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil (1998), the Aldo Leopold Award from the
American Society of Mammalogists (2004), Sigma Xi’s John P. McGovern Science
and Society Award (2007), the Sir Peter Scott Award of IUCN’s Species Survival
Commission (2008), the Association of Tropical Biology’s Special Recognition
Award for Conservation (2008), Harvard University’s Roger Tory Peterson Medal
(2009), the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s João Pedro Cardoso Award (2011), and
Instituto-E and the City of Rio de Janeiro’s E-Award (2012) in recognition of
his conservation work. In 2016, he was
elected to the American Association for Arts and Sciences (AAAS). In 2017, he was
awarded the prestigious Centennial Award of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
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