‘We need to move fast’: As Vivek Menon makes history at IUCN, an interview
He is the first Asian to head the Species Survival Commission, which shapes the pivotal IUCN Red List. ‘There should be maybe 8 million species on it,’ he says.
“Awareness is so 18th-century. Awareness alone won’t change anything. How do you convert awareness to participation, and participation to involvement: that is the question,” says Vivek Menon.
This approach — of movement, action, collaboration and more movement — is part of the reason Menon recently became the first person from outside Europe and North America to head the Species Survival Commission (SSC), a core body within the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
SSC consists of over 200 specialist groups and 11,000 volunteer scientists. It drives updates to the international research organisation’s crucial Red List of Threatened Species, which determines which animals need greater protection.
In this way, IUCN, largely through SSC, assesses the conservation status of about 1.7 lakh species.
Menon, who has worked with IUCN for 25 years, knows exactly what he wants to do, and is wasting no time getting started. On his second day in office, he began implementing a key set of changes: a shift towards greater diversity.
On October 16, he reformed the steering committee to include more women (the male-to-female ratio has gone from 60:40 to 55:45), and include more representation from sub-regions such as the Pacific Islands.
It’s when everyone works together that we learn, says Menon, 57.
“Countries in the Global South know how to integrate culture and heritage with modern scientific concepts,” he adds. “The Global South is closer to its roots and finds it easier to acknowledge that nature has a place in our world. This is now happening in the West too. But more people need to understand the traditional value of nature.”
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A multi-award-winning conservationist, Menon first sent ripples through IUCN during his 10 years as head of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group.
During his tenure, he got all 13 countries home to Asian elephants to sign a common minimum programme that ensured specific impact and time-oriented conservation plans. This resulted in 10 of the 13 countries setting up national elephant action plans too. In at least one country, Vietnam, it kept the species from going extinct.
“When government representatives sit down with scientists, rather than each faction remaining in their own ivory tower, then national policy can change far more easily,” Menon says.
The “elephant guy”, as he is known to peers, is now looking to replicate this formula across SSC’s specialist groups. Closer monitoring as a result of such collaboration would help IUCN more effectively update its Red List of Threatened Species as well, he says.
“There should be over a million, maybe even eight million species on the Red List, according to some estimates,” says Menon. “The barometer of life is very large and we are struggling to assess all of them. I want to see how we can work together, use modern tools, whether it’s AI or something else, and speed up this whole process of updating the list.”
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He knows it won’t be easy, but Menon is no stranger to complexity.
In his nearly-four-decades in the field, he has co-founded multiple environmental and conservation NGOs, including the Wildlife Trust of India, in 1998. He is the author of the bestselling Field Guide to Indian Mammals (2003).
He remains particularly proud of his first-ever conservation mission: at 19, while still studying for a Bachelor’s degree in zoology at Delhi University, he set up the NGO Srishti, which was instrumental in campaigning against a government plan to turn the Delhi Ridge into a rose garden.
He was in his early 20s when he co-founded Traffic India, a wildlife-trade monitoring programme affiliated with the World Wide Fund for Nature. As part of his work with Traffic, he spent two years undercover, exposing links in the network of illegal ivory and rhino horn trade.
Those years of research helped him and other researchers and activists fight to have India’s key elephant corridors notified. “This is one of the things I’m rather proud of,” he says.
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It began for him, as it usually does, in childhood.
Menon grew up all over the country, the son of a doctor and an automobile engineer. He likes to say he is a Malayali born in Coimbatore who spent the first few years in Delhi and then found himself in Chandigarh. Treks into the Himalayas gave him his first close contact with nature.
“Back then I just wanted to take animals home,” Menon laughs. “I would rescue parakeets, snakes, monkeys, and once even tried to keep an injured flapshell turtle in our water cooler.”
Visits to pet stores gave him his first exposure to illegal animal trade.
Seeing his deep empathy for animals, his father introduced him to the works of Jane Goodall, Iain Douglas-Hamilton and EP Gee. “Some of these people had left research positions in Oxford to work in Africa, which he didn’t understand,” Menon says. “But he said if I wanted to work with animals, then I had better read these guys.”
Those authors were, in a way, his first mentors. They left him with a yearning for time in the field that hasn’t left him. Even while in Abu Dhabi for the meeting at which his new position was announced, he made time to go birding.
As a young researcher, he remembers long days of walking, during which time he was chased by elephants and, once, a rhinoceros. One particularly hot day in Tamil Nadu, he crawled into a bush for some respite and ran into a boar that had the same idea. The animal rushed off, leaving him with a scar he still bears on his leg.
“Today people don’t walk in the forest. Even many forest officers don’t,” he says. “In every sphere of our lives, we are perennially pulling ourselves away from nature.”
It’s time to reconnect, to truly understand what’s at stake, Menon adds.
“There is a set of people who only care about 6% economic growth. That set of people think nature is hindering growth. Not understanding that nature is really the bedrock of it all.”
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