Professor Natarajan Ishwaran

Professorship

University of Exeter, UK

Ishwaran has a BSc (Hons) in Zoology and an MSc in ecology from Sri Lanka and a Ph.D. in wildlife biology and management from Michigan State University, USA. Between 1975 and 1985 he worked on Sri Lankan projects on elephants and other large mammals as well as on management planning for tropical rainforests. He worked in UNESCO from 1986 to 2012, both at the Headquarters in Paris and the Regional Office for Science and Technology in Jakarta, Indonesia. He was Chief, Natural heritage Section at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre (1996-2004) and Director of the Division of Ecological and Earth Sciences and Secretary of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program (2004-2012). In 2012 he was recruited as a State Expert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences under the Chinese Government’s “Thousand Talents Program” and worked with the International Centre on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage (HIST) in Beijing until 2015. He helped HIST to design, develop and implement projects and initiatives to demonstrate space technology applications for conservation, management and sustainable development of UNESCO World Heritage sites and biosphere reserves in Cambodia, China, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka. Since October 2015 he is Paris-based and continues to serve as a visiting professor at HIST; he also works with ProNatura International to promote sustainable land use and land use change in Asia. In May 2017 he accepted a 3-year, Honorary Professorship with the School of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. From 1 January 2018 he is the Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Development, and Elsevier Journal.