WWF’s Jeamme Chia on the long game for conservation

First roots

I first started thinking seriously about a career in conservation during a college class on political ecology. But my love of nature started much earlier in my hometown of Penang, Malaysia. As a child, I spent my weekends hiking through the parks near the neighborhood where I grew up. Even indoors, though, nature was never far. Many of our family friends were scientists or environmentalists, so dinner parties often turned to talk of vanishing forests and the warming climate. Those conversations still inform how I think about conservation work.

Mission control

As the project manager for the Nature-Based Solutions Origination Platform (WWF’s initiative to drive multiple sources of finance toward investments in high-quality nature-based solutions), my job is to help us realize our mission. I draw on my technical proficiency—in finance, conservation planning, carbon markets, and more—to strategize and guide multiple teams, ensuring they work in sync and that information flows to the right people. Some of my coworkers call me the “air traffic controller,” as I help make sure that activities within the initiative “land” on time. I feel most satisfied when everything clicks, people are aligned, and we start to see real, positive impacts on the world’s critical forest landscapes.

Seeing change

My idea of success is seeing the impact of nature-based solutions on the landscape. For example, one of the priority activities in the Central Annamites in Viet Nam, one of the platform’s five target tropical forest landscapes, is to transition away from a purely extractive approach to forestry by improving forest management through Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) certification and native tree planting. As a result, the area could gain more species diversity. What would that look like? You might see it in the shape of the canopy, the sound of birds returning, the feel of a place recovering. In other words, there will be visible, tangible impacts of long-term planning and intervention.

Staying humble

Last summer, I visited the Central Annamites. In meetings with the Vietnamese government and local NGOs, I was reminded that the landscape carries layers of history that are not always visible. As conservationists, we care deeply about the future, but we also need to consider the past. I was humbled to learn about the decades-long effort to restore the landscape after the war in Viet Nam destroyed a significant portion of the forest.

Jeamme Chia is the Project Manager of WWF’s Nature-Based Solutions Origination Platform.