Scientific Advisor, Bolivia Nature Foundation
Nigel Asquith is the Scientific Advisor at the Santa Cruz-based Fundación Natura Bolivia (www.naturabolivia.org and www.bolivianature.org). His team has helped create a new 734,000 hectare protected area and has set up 30 municipal, incentive-based conservation programs, which annually support 2,500 families with $200,000 worth of alternative development projects, thus helping them to conserve 150,000 hectares of biodiverse tropical forests. These “Reciprocal Watershed Agreements” (RWA) have been replicated and scaled up by other organizations across the Andes. He also directed the transition of the $17 million EcoFund Foundation to become a strategic conservation investor in northern Ecuador. Mr. Asquith has also worked at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for International Forestry Research, Conservation International, and the World Bank. Currently, he has an extensive research program, most recently based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, assessing the feasibility of incentive-based environmental management. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University in 1989, a Master’s degree in Ecology from the University of Illinois in 1994, as well as a Master’s degree in Policy and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University in 1999.
