Nigel Asquith

Nigel Asquith is the Director of Policy at the Santa Cruz-based Fundación Natura Bolivia, where, since 2003, his team has helped create a new 734,000 hectares protected area and has set up 32 municipal water funds. These funds annually support 3,500 families with $250,000 worth of alternative development projects, thus helping to conserve 135,000 hectares of biodiverse tropical forests. Called “reciprocal watershed agreements” (RWA), the practice has been replicated and scaled up by other organizations across the Andes. Mr. Asquith has worked at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for International Forestry Research, Conservation International, and the World Bank. He has an extensive research program, most recently based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, assessing the feasibility of market-based tools for environmental management, and he was a Research fellow at Harvard’s Sustainability Science Program in 2008/9 and 2013/14. He has a Bachelor of Arts from Oxford University and a PhD in Zoology from Duke University.