Alexandra Zimmermann is Associate Professor at WildCRU and the founding Chair of the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group. She works globally in the field of human-wildlife conflict and coexistence (HWCC) and conservation conflict resolution. Over the past 25 years, this has included a range of socio-political contexts such as conflicts over jaguars and pumas in Brazil and Venezuela, elephants in India and Indonesia, tigers in Nepal, bears in Bolivia, and fruit bats in Mauritius. Her work focuses on the hidden social causes of conflict, community-led solutions, stakeholder dialogue, and conflict prevention.

At WildCRU she co-leads the Conflict & Coexistence Theme, supervises doctoral students and leads a Master’s module on HWCC. She has also trained several hundred researchers, practitioners, and government officers around the world in human-wildlife conflict management and conflict resolution, and runs an independent professional training course called Negotiating Coexistence.

As Chair of the IUCN SSC Human-Wildlife Conflict & Coexistence Specialist Group, she led the group’s work in the development of the IUCN Guidelines on Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence, and established the HWCC International Conferences, the first of which was co-hosted with WildCRU in Oxford in 2023. She plays an active role in international policy, particularly for Target 4 of the

CBD Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its implementation and monitoring, for which she facilitates practice-policy links and cross-sectoral collaborations. For these efforts she received the Harry Messel Award for Conservation Leadership from IUCN in 2024.

Alexandra works extensively in the intergovernmental sector, and was a senior advisor to the Global Wildlife Program of the World Bank for five years. She is a frequent technical advisor to a number of institutions including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Royal Commission for Al Ula, and serves on the boards of the Arabian Leopard Fund and within the UN-led Collaborative Partnership for Wildlife, among many others. Before this she was Head of Conservation Science at Chester Zoo, where she secured five Darwin Initiative grants and led community-based human-wildlife coexistence efforts in South Asia and Latin America.

Alexandra was raised in Indonesia, Lebanon, Germany, France, and Canada and was initially trained in zoology (BSc, Leeds) and conservation biology (MSc, DICE) before gaining her doctorate in conservation social science (DPhil, Oxford). She then trained in conflict negotiation at Harvard Law School and diplomatic negotiation at the United Nations. She seeks to bring insights from conflict studies and diplomacy into biodiversity conservation.