Susan Canney has worked on a variety of nature conservation projects across Africa, Asia and Europe, in research, strategic management, policy and governance; and as a research officer for the UK Government’s independent adviser on sustainable development at the Green College Centre for Environmental Policy & Understanding. She has worked in central Mali since 2003  to develop an integrated model of human-elephant co-existence, in what has become a lawless zone suffering from conflict and insurgency. Her over-arching interest is how to bring ecological literacy to decision making so that actions are guided by a right relationship to the planet, specifically using systems perspectives and collaborative approaches to find sustainable solutions to the co-existence of humans and nature. She is a Trustee of Tusk Trust, a Tusk Conservation Award Judge, a member of the IUCN Human Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Specialist Group, the African Elephant Specialist Group, and the World Commission on Protected Areas. In 2012 she co-authored a book on “Conservation” for Cambridge University Press.

Topics of specific interest:

• Systems approaches to conservation practice – identifying the features of the approach used in Mali that has been so (surprisingly) resilient despite lawlessness and insurgency and resulted in the creation of a new protected area that has ownership by local communities [1]. This plays into the current debates around OECMs and the local community ownership of conservation
• Conservation and human-wildlife conflict and co-existence in armed conflict zones
• Issues of livestock and drylands, especially in the Sahel
• The role of youth in environmental protection and regeneration (with collateral benefits of reduction of risk of radicalisation and emigration).
• The CBD 2050 vision, the Global Biodiversity Framework and its relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (including a particular concern that the role of large animals in ecosystem functioning is recognised [2]).

[1] S. M. Canney (2021) Making Space for Nature: Elephant Conservation in Mali as a Case Study in Sustainability, Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 63:2, 4-15, https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2021.1871292

[2] Yadvinder Malhi, Tonya Lander, Elizabeth le Roux, Nicola Stevens, Marc Macias-Fauria, Lisa Wedding, Cécile Girardin, Jeppe Ågård Kristensen, Christopher J. Sandom, Tom D. Evans, Jens-Christian Svenning, Susan Canney (2022) The role of large wild animals in climate change mitigation and adaptation, Current Biology, 32: 4, R181-R196, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.041.