S2E23: SFI Working Group on Biodiversity

This bonus episode is an impromptu roundtable discussion that was part of a working group at the Santa Fe Institute in February 2024 on biodiversity and the sustainable development goals. The Santa Fe Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. It was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists, many affiliated with with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SFI host a range of gatherings at different scales, form public conferences to small working groups. This working group was organized by two SFI affiliated scholars: Andy Dobson who is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, an evolutionary anthropologist who is at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They group included scholars and practitioners from the social and behavioral sciences, conservation biology and ecology and law. The focus on the group was the question of how to jumpstart progress on halting biodiversity loss in the context of the the UN sustainable development goals. The conversation in this podcast is with several members in the working group. The others in the conversation were Liam Smith, an expert in behavioral change and the director of BehaviorWorks Australia at Monash University; Tim O’Brien, an ecologist who worked for decades at the Wildlife Conservation Society; Margaret Kinnaird, an ecologist and the Global Wildlife Practice Leader at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature – International; Matt Turner, a post-doc and expert on computational modeling at the Stanford School of Sustainability; and Tim Caro, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Bristol.