Prof Stephen Garnett

Stephen Garnett has been working on threatened species conservation for over thirty years and is the Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University.

Stephen wrote the first action plan for Australian birds in 1992 and led subsequent iterations in 2000 and 2011. He has worked in the field on Golden-shouldered Parrots on Cape York Peninsula and Glossy Black-Cockatoos on Kangaroo Island.

Since 2003, Stephen has coordinated the BirdLife Australia Threatened Species Committee which advises the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on the Red List status of Australian birds. In 2014, he was appointed as Councillor for birds with the Convention on Migratory Species.

Recognising that conservation is more about people than biology, Stephen’s research in the last decade has increasingly expanded to include people and policy, particularly among Indigenous peoples in northern Australia and others in the broader region whose livelihoods are directly connected to the environments in which they live.

This research also encompasses economic issues on the basis that conservation will only succeed if biodiversity is valued, so understanding human values is fundamental to any conservation endeavour.