Christoph Imboden

Christoph Imboden "is an ecologist and biodiversity conservation expert who has been working internationally for the past 30 years and been closely associated with IUCN, especially its Species Survival Commission, since the early 1980s. After completing his PhD on an ornithological topic in Switzerland he moved to New Zealand under a postgraduate scholarship where his initial interest in academic ecological research was soon diverted towards the enormous practical conservation problems faced by a country that had undergone rapid human colonisation and flooding by alien species. After these formative years he became director (and first employee) of an international bird conservation federation which, under his 16-year stewardship, was transformed into BirdLife International.

"For the past 12 years Christoph has been working as an independent Consultant in Europe, Africa and Asia. A multitude of short and long assignments for national and international NGOs, governments, international agencies and the business sector, on a wide variety of topics, reflect his broad interest and experiences – ranging from strategic planning to programme evaluation, from institutional management to the development and implementation of conservation projects on the ground, from biodiversity conservation to management of protected areas and conservation education, from general policies on corporate social responsibility to specific corporate sustainability strategies. As an on-going activity he has been advising a large consumer goods company for the past ten years on CRS issues, successfully convincing them to invest significantly in a series of external environmental programmes benefiting global biodiversity conservation. While a lot of his work today of strategic and advisory nature, he always maintained in his portfolio a direct involvement in some practical field projects (development, planning, supervision), such as, at the moment, conservation education programmes in Austria, India and China." CV

• Independent Expert Panel (chair), IUCN-Holcim
• 1976-1977 - New Zealand Wildlife Service, Wissenschaftler in leitender Position
• 1978-1980 - New Zealand Wildlife Service, Stellvertretender Leiter (Forschung)
• 1980-1996 - BirdLife International, Generaldirektor
• ab 1999 - D. Swarovski & Co, Österreich, Berater des Vorstands in Umweltfragen
• 1999-2000 - WWF International, Africa Programme, Nairobi; Berater für strategische Planung, Programmentwicklung und Auslastungsstudien
• 2002-2003 - WWF Schweiz, Stellvertretender Geschäftsführer