Curiosity and co-incidence led Professor Chris Sandbrook to a life-long passion for conservation, education and understanding the role that people play in nature’s future. 

The new Director of the Cambridge Conservation Research Institute (CRI) has enjoyed a rich career that includes mountain gorillas in Uganda and seeing tigers in northern India, but it’s people as a key part of the conservation puzzle that is the focus of his research. 

As an undergraduate Natural Sciences student at Cambridge, Chris was firmly fixed on the biological side of conservation - the science of species, habitats and ecosystems. His then girlfriend was studying Geography. Conversations with her would start a journey that changed the way he thought about conservation forever. 

She was studying conservation from a completely different angle with courses about politics, power, and the impact of conservation on local communities. It all sounded interesting and a bit strange to a Nat Sci student, so he went along to a few lectures. 

“Twenty-five years later, I’m the one giving those lectures.”  

The CRI is an Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC), uniting academics around common causes and across all six Cambridge Schools. Their members’ sprawling interests have crystallised into making CRI a unique force in the world of conservation.  

As Director, Chris stands at a crucial juncture, where the University meets the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI). The latter has 10 partner NGO organisations and networks, who put research into practice and enjoy the patronage of Sir David Attenborough.   

The CRI team stretches across more than seven Cambridge departments. Active members include David Coomes, David Edwards and Adriane Esquivel Muelbert from Plant Sciences; Rachael Garrett, Emily Lines, Matthew Adeleye and Andrew Friend from Geography; Bill Sutherland, Andrew Balmford, Lynn Dicks and Rob Fletcher from Zoology; Anil Madhavapeddy and Srinivasan Keshav from Computer Sciences; and Laura Diaz Anadon, Aiora Zabala and Andreas Kontoleon from Land Economy, among others.  

Chris’s vision for CRI, like his career, typically centres around a holistic approach that seeks to make the best use of a diverse organisation, teaching and people.  

He would like the CRI to increase the level of interdisciplinary collaboration across its community of over 25 academics, (including around sixteen who are based in the David Attenborough Building) and more than 100 early career researchers (masters, PhDs and postdocs), as well as with the 10 conservation organisations in the CCI. 

“I'm a big believer in creating the enabling conditions and the environment, which allows for people to connect and ideas to bubble up and, then for big things to happen.” 

Alongside his research interests and the CRI, Chris is also Director of the Cambridge Masters in Conservation Leadership, which has seen some 300 students from more than 90 countries around the world come through the programme. 

He’d like to make a similarly holistic course available as an optional interdisciplinary fourth year part of the Cambridge undergraduate degree programme, potentially alongside a new Masters course which would allow external students to join.  

“We might think about that interdisciplinary early career, slightly more research-oriented teaching to sit alongside the Masters in Conservation Leadership, which is much more of a mid-career professional programme.” 

A cautious fan of technological advances like drones and remote camera traps that have allowed researchers to collect more data in the wild, Chris has also seen how they can be abused and has far-reaching concerns about Artificial Intelligence.  

Last year, he published a paper with Dr Trishant Simlai, a former student who is now the Teaching Associate on the Masters in Conservation Leadership, on how remote cameras and drones deployed for studying tigers and other wildlife in northern India were being misused by  local officials and male villagers to keep watch on women without their consent.  

“I've tried to position myself as a kind of critical friend of the conservation industry with respect to technology. So, I’m not trying to say you should never use it and it's all terrible, but just trying to encourage people to think really carefully about ethical issues.” 

On Artificial Intelligence, Chris thinks the use of AI tools in conservation is interesting, but his particular concern revolves around how AI could transform human society across healthcare, demographics, labour markets, agriculture, and more, and the implications this would have for nature and climate. 

He said that any conservation science lecture these days is likely to suggest that the big underlying drivers of biodiversity loss are things like agriculture, where people live and how they live and the kind of things that we consume. 

“All of those things are likely to be changed quite dramatically by AI in the next few years and that will probably dwarf any impact that conservation using an AI tool might have.” 

So, he is trying to drum up interest in a research programme that attempts to anticipate what those impacts might be, while considering regulation and policy. As a first step in this process, Chris co-wrote a motion on AI and Conservation that was recently passed by the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. This will lead to the creation of an IUCN Task Force to address this critical issue.  

“Ideally doing all of this with the people involved in those policy decisions because the genie is rapidly escaping the bottle.” 

As a leader and a teacher, Chris believes values remain fundamental to conservation work and would like to see a stronger balance between the bio-centric “nature for nature’s sake” focus in the community and the anthropocentric view, which argues that conserving nature is also a long-term benefit for human health and well-being.  

Some people in the conservation community see capitalism as the underlying driver for biodiversity loss and so don’t believe in market-based solutions for example. But the complex relationship between market forces, nature and humanity are such that there are rare examples of successful integration.  

Chris, who did his PhD studying the impact that mountain gorilla tourism had on people living around the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda, has demonstrated in his own work that benefits for humans and nature can co-exist when conservation and human activity are in sync. 

After his PhD, he won funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to set up a community-based organisation helping local Ugandan farmers to produce and sell fruit and vegetables to the Park’s nearby tourist hotels, which had previously been buying all their produce from the capital, 12 hours drive away.  

He realised the area around the park was incredibly fertile and great for growing all of these products, but all the farms were too small and not working together. The project sought to be a success in an area where win-wins are rare.  

“So it was trying to be a kind of classic conservation and development intervention. As is often the case, it was a partial success, because doing conservation in a way that works for everyone is incredibly challenging. But I think it made things a little bit better.”  

Professor Chris Sandbrook is Professor of Conservation & Society in the Department of Geography, Director of the MPhil in Conservation Leadership, Fellow of Darwin Collegeand Director of the Conservation Research Institute.

Published: 31 October 2025

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