Phoebe Barnard

Phoebe Barnard is an affiliated researcher at SEI Oxford. She is a global change ecologist, futures and conservation science professor, public policy strategist, systems analyst, gap filler, transformative change convener, and documentary film producer. She has worked extensively in governments, non-profit organizations and global initiatives, and, at the same time, with a strong and productive foot in academia.

Her core expertise is on the vulnerability and adaptation of ecosystems and biodiversity to global change; cascading and multi-threat risks to society and the biosphere; behavioural ecology; and climate adaptation and restoration.

She is a veteran convener of complex initiatives; an ardent mentor; a team builder and leader; a futures and systems thinker and foresight analyst, and film producer – all related to these crossroads of humanity.

Phoebe worked in post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa for 34 years, setting up and leading national, bioregional and community initiatives on human impacts on the planet and our societies, training and mentoring young professionals, and building collaborative teams. This was recently followed by nine years in the US founding and leading transformative and collaborative planetary and societal change initiatives at global and bioregional scales.

As a planetary scientist, she has worked deeply in evidence-based and geospatially explicit decision-support, citizen science-fuelled biodiversity early warning systems, and climate and global change hindcasting and forecasting.

As a government strategist, she has worked to bring science into policy reform, strategic planning, adaptive management and research and monitoring systems to fill gaps and assess uncertainties at global levels. She was a lead negotiator of the Convention on Biological Diversity, as science and technology director of the Global Invasive Species Programme and as a board/executive committee member of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

And as a university professor, she has mentored, coached and academically supervised young professionals across Africa and the globe at undergraduate, MSc, PhD and postdoctoral levels. She taught month-long field courses in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania with the Tropical Biology Association and the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, and established leadership incentive and networking programs such as the Society for Conservation Biology – Africa Section’s Young Women Conservation Biologists Award.

Phoebe has published nearly 195 academic and popular articles and several books. She gives regular interviews and podcasts. She is a core strategy member of the Ecological Civilization Coalition; a member of the Club of Rome’s Planetary Emergency Partnership; Commissioner of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Commission on Protected Areas; and a founder and leader of many scientific, science-policy, strategy and communications initiatives. Much of her work is outlined in a Wikipedia summary and on her webpage.

She is also a documentary film co-producer and scriptwriter with globally broadcast films in The Climate Restorers series (2025) and new works, also with her filmmaker husband, John Bowey, on climate repair, societal transformation, and climate, risk and war.

She has also observed how events are overtaking us. Is conservation or ecosystem restoration succeeding at all? Is development even effective in the long term? She is keen to experiment with how we might do things more strategically and impactfully in these harsh headwinds of civilizational dysfunction.

Phoebe Barnard

SEI Affiliated Researcher

Selected publications

Selected perspectives

Further work