IUCN WCPA Sustainable Finance Specialist Group

David Meyers is the Executive Director of the Conservation Finance Alliance. He is an environmental finance expert and entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience in sustainability, business strategy and management, environmental economics, international conservation and development, environmental impact assessment, training, education and research in ecology and evolution. From 2012 until 2018, David was a Sr. Technical Advisor for the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN/UNDP). David has launched and managed various companies including a financial services company providing online marketplaces for impact investing and environmental assets, a triple-bottom-line bamboo-flooring manufacturer in Madagascar, and a technology incubator. At the CFA David has led the creation of the CFA Incubator and the Investment Plan for the Global Fund for Coral Reefs. David has spent well over a decade in Madagascar and has worked in 47 countries. In Madagascar, he helped the country plan and execute a doubling of the area under conservation, including establishing the Makira Natural Park 370,000 hectare protected area using REDD+ financing. He holds a Doctorate in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy from Duke University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.

Lucy Emerton has degrees in social anthropology and development economics. She has been working as an environmental economist and conservation finance adviser for the last 35 years across more than 80 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Lucy’s work focuses particularly on the development of innovative conservation finance and incentive mechanisms, as well as economic and investment planning and decision-support tools such as biodiversity and ecosystem valuation and the development of conservation business cases and bankable projects. She has published extensively on these topics, and has developed and delivered a wide range of methodologies, guidelines and training modules for both economic and conservation decision-makers, practitioners and researchers. From 1990 to 1998, Lucy worked for the UK Government’s Department for International Development as an agricultural and natural resource economist in Kenya, led the development of African Wildlife Foundation’s conservation economics programme in Eastern and Southern Africa, and coordinated UNDP-GEF project activities on institutional strengthening of economic aspects of biodiversity conservation in East Africa. Between 1998 and 2008, she established and ran the environmental economics programmes of IUCN (the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) in Africa and Asia as well as providing technical oversight and backstopping to IUCN's economics activities in Latin America, Europe and at the global level. Since 2008 Lucy has been working as an independent technical advisor, policy strategist, trainer and researcher for GIZ, KfW, WCS, the World Bank, WWF, UNDP, UNEP, FAO and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), as well as a variety of other bilateral, multilateral, non-governmental, United Nations and private sector organisations worldwide.