Edwin Pynegar
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Status
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Doctoral researcher
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About me
Hi! I’m Edwin; I was born in 1991 on the Isle of Man and grew up in Nottingham. Aged 18 I went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study Natural Sciences, where I realized that while fruit flies and pipettes were not really my thing, global environmental and conservation issues very much were. And so, after finishing my Bachelor’s exams in June 2012 I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship from Trinity College to go and study in Germany for a year, and that’s how I came to work in the Biogeography group at HU Berlin.
I’m interested in questions surrounding the relationship between a world of 7, 8, 9, or 10 billion people and what remains of wild nature, such as: how much biodiversity are we going to have to lose to feed a rapidly developing world? How can we minimise this damage? Can conservation and development really go hand in hand, as many conservation scientists like to think, or will they actually in practice often be opposed to one another? And, how much biodiversity does humanity need, anyway, and if the answer to that is “not all of it”, how can we persuade either policymakers or the general public to get behind the idea of conservation?
In the past I've also done some more "hands-on" conservation: I've done monitoring of sea turtle populations in coral reefs off Borneo as well as volunteering at an elephant conservation and welfare project in the north of Thailand, and I've worked as an intern at the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge.