IUCN WCPA Protected Areas and Climate Change Specialist Group

Lauren Wenzel led the National Marine Protected Areas Center at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 2012-2025. As a member of WCPA, she continues her work connecting and strengthening diverse marine and coastal protected areas and building their resilience to climate change through capacity building, information and tools, and communication and engaging stakeholders. Her focus is on building partnerships among marine and coastal programs and stakeholders to demonstrate and communicate the value of protecting the ocean’s most important places.

Professor Jedediah Brodie is the Craighead Endowed Chair of Conservation at the University of Montana and a conservation biologist whose research focuses on tropical forest ecology, climate resilience, and species interactions. Working across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Americas, he studies how anthropogenic changes, including hunting, logging, and climate, affect biodiversity, habitat connectivity, and forest carbon dynamics. His research integrates long-term field studies (using camera traps, acoustic monitoring, and drone-based surveys) with ecological modeling to understand community dynamics, ecosystem resilience, and the consequences of defaunation for carbon storage. He has contributed to large-scale conservation planning efforts, including identifying 350,000 hectares for new protected areas in Sabah and developing landscape connectivity strategies in Sarawak, Malaysia, with the goal of advancing solutions that benefit both biodiversity and human livelihoods. He was recently an elected councilor to the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and is a research fellow at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.

Adam has three decades of experience in conservation and climate change. He is an expert on understanding and managing the climate vulnerability of natural and cultural heritage sites, including World Heritage properties, and is a leading voice for the inclusion of biodiversity and cultural heritage in national and international climate policy. He was Deputy Director for Climate and Energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) for twelve years, prior to which he was the founding director of U.S. climate solutions organization Clean Air-Cool Planet. He is also a former Director of the climate team at WWF International. At UCS he conceived and initiated a multidisciplinary project to build capacity to ethically combine Western science with Indigenous Knowledge to support climate justice and resilience strategies.

Adam has written and published widely on climate change threats to biodiversity, cultural heritage and protected areas, and he has been active in the IPCC, the UNFCCC and the World Heritage Convention. He is an advisor to Preserving Legacies, a board member of World Heritage USA, and a expert member of the ICOMOS Climate Action Working Group and the International Committee for Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM). He studied zoology at Swansea University and archaeology at the University of the Highlands and Islands, and has been a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas since 2017. Adam is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.