Hello
I am George, the newest Carbon Projects Officer at CO2Balance in Taunton. I am excited to have joined the teams’ great efforts in developing climate mitigation and sustainable development projects.
I join CO2Balance with a background in conservation, studying Wildlife Biology at the University of South Wales, which allowed me to undertake research in South Africa and Mexico, as well as spending the summer trekking the Brecon Beacons as part of my dissertation. After a year away from education, I began a Research Masters in Wildlife Conservation at the University of Southampton where I began studying Ecosystem Services. This course allowed me to work closely with conservation biologists at Marwell Wildlife, and with top Ecosystem Service scientists at the university. During the course I began designing a project to investigate the ecosystem service benefits of a wildlife conservancy in Kenya, before having to reorganise to a UK based project in which I investigated the benefits of rewetting a mixed heath and mire landscape. It is during this project that I became really engaged in nature-based solutions to climate mitigation and the wider carbon market.
My first international volunteering was in Madagascar when I was a teenager, a place I would return to after finishing my undergraduate degree. This gave me an opportunity to engage with the local community and undertaking research on their interactions with the local wildlife. Back in the UK, over the last few years I have volunteered with Surrey Wildlife Trust, the Hawks Conservancy Trust, and BioCycle, a student run charity in Southampton providing food waste removal using our bikes, a trailer, and a community allotment. Since graduating in October, I have spent the last six months at the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Here I worked in both the Climate Change & Biodiversity and Science departments working on assessing climate mitigation for a range of restoration projects and by researching the potential interactions between ecosystem services and agricultural yields, and how these may be integrated into climate and economic scenario analyses.
I am an avid hiker and rock climber, having been to the top of the Atlas Mountains and Cairngorm in the middle of January. On many of my hikes I enjoy wildlife and landscape photography, as well as looking out for birds of prey.
