Jeffrey A. McNeely spent 30 years at IUCN working on international conservation issues before retiring as Chief Scientist in 2009, having worked in over 85 countries. Prior to joining IUCN, he spent 12 years in Asia, including 7 years in Thailand, 2 years in Nepal, and 3 years in Indonesia. He started as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand working in water resources development for rural schools, then worked with FAO on linking conservation with the development of the water resources of the Lower Mekong Basin. He led the WWF-IUCN Indonesia Programme from 1977 to 1980, overseeing some 35 projects aimed at supporting Indonesia’s efforts to develop a national system of protected areas that would support development objectives.
He is now a Member of the UNEP International Resource Panel (currently on the Water Working Group), Chair of the IUCN Red List Committee, A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, Member of the Board of EcoAgriculture Partners (of which he was co-founder), Member of the International Risk Governance Council, Science Patron of Earthwatch Europe, and Member of the Order of the Golden Ark. He provides consultancy services to international agencies, governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. He has written or edited over 40 books and published some 500 scientific and popular articles. He is currently working to link biodiversity to sustainable agriculture, human health, biotechnology, climate change, energy, and more traditional conservation fields such as species, protected areas, ecosystems, and economics.
Contributed to the following reports
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Building Natural Capital: How REDD+ Can Support a Green Economy
This report, on the status and future potential of REDD+, describes the benefits of forests and other ecosystems as a way of demonstrating that forests have multiple values beyond carbon sequestration and are a foundation for sustainable societies.
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Assessing Global Land Use
This report examines the impacts of global trends - population growth, urbanization, changes in diets and consumption behaviours - on global land use, considering biodiversity, the supply of food, fibre and fuel, and resource security.
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Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production
This report gives a scientific assessment of which global environmental problems present the biggest challenges, and weighs up the impacts of various economic activities to identify priorities for change.
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Assessing Biofuels
This report provides a robust assessment of key problems of production and use of biomass for energy purposes and options for more efficient and sustainable production and use of biomass.
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Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth
We are using unsustainable amounts of the Earth’s natural resources. We need to improve the rate of resource productivity (“doing more with less”) faster than the economic growth rate. This is the notion behind “decoupling”.