A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Tony Juniper is the Chair of Natural England, the official Government organisation working for the conservation and restoration of the natural environment in England. He is also a Fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), working as a member of the teaching faculty and contributing to several programmes, including The Prince Of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme. He is also the Chair of the rainforest organisation Cool Earth and a Trustee of Fauna and Flora International. Juniper also assists Union Bancaire Privée with impact investing strategies as a member of the Impact Advisory Board and as the co-chair of the Advisory Committee to the bank’s new pioneering biodiversity recovery fund.

He began his environmental career in the 1980s, working with an innovative conservation education project in Oxfordshire with the Wildlife Trust. Juniper later worked as an ornithologist with Birdlife International , spearheading a program to prevent the extinction of critically endangered parrots. He became a recognized expert on this group and later co-authored (with Mike Parr) Parrots: A guide to the parrots of the world.

In 1990 Juniper joined the staff of Friends of the Earth, initially leading the organisation’s tropical rainforest campaign, both in the UK and internationally. From 1993 he took forward the Friends of the Earth’s work on biodiversity and later he became involved in transport policy, leading the campaign against the Newbury Bypass. In 1998 he became Policy and Campaigns Director at Friends of the Earth, and in this role played a leading part in many initiatives, including on GM crops, world trade policy and industrial pollution. During his period he led a coalition campaign that resulted in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.

From 2003 to 2008 he was the organisation’s Executive Director in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and from 2001 to 2008 was also elected Vice Chair of the 70-strong network of national organizations that comprise Friends of the Earth International. He contributed to many of Friends of the Earth’s most important achievements, including new laws to require more recycling and policy changes in the transport and farming sectors.

Friends of the Earth’s greatest achievement during Juniper’s time as director was the success of the Big Ask campaign, which set out to gain legal controls on greenhouse gas emissions. This was delivered through a huge grass roots lobbying effort in partnership with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. The UK’s world-leading statutory greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets as set out in the Climate Change Act 2008 resulted directly from the success of this campaign.