Nigel Asquith

Nigel is President of the Santa Cruz, Bolivia-based Watershared where his team has helped create more than 50 municipal incentive-based conservation programs. From 2005-2008, he directed the transition of the $17 million EcoFund Foundation to become a strategic conservation investor in northern Ecuador. He has also worked at the Smithsonian Institution, the Center for International Forestry Research, Conservation International, and the World Bank. Nigel’s work is currently funded by the European Commission and the MacArthur Foundation, and he previously received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Blue Moon Fund, and the UK’s Department for International Development. Nigel’s technical expertise is in plant-animal relations in neotropical forests, ecosystem service valuation, policy analysis, and the impacts of the oil and gas sector on biodiversity. Nigel has an extensive research program, most recently based out of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, assessing the feasibility of market-based tools for environmental management.

He was a research fellow at Harvard’s Sustainability Science Program in 2008-2009 and 2013-2014. Nigel has a doctorate in zoology and a master’s in policy from Duke University, a master’s in ecology from University of Illinois and a bachelor’s in geography from Oxford University. He was a Kinship Conservation Fellow in 2005.