Senior Consultant, EcoAdvisors
Dr. Eduard Niesten serves as Senior Consultant with boutique conservation services firm EcoAdvisors. Throughout his career he has focused on designing effective conservation approaches with a particular interest in direct incentives and sustainable finance. Before joining EcoAdvisors, he spent 14 years at Conservation International designing, implementing and evaluating incentive-based interventions that advanced conservation and human wellbeing. As head of Conservation International’s Conservation Stewards Program he led implementation of conservation agreements in a broad portfolio of projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This portfolio included 51 conservation agreements that improve standards of living for resource-dependent communities, benefitting nearly 35,000 people and conserving nearly 1.5 million hectares of natural habitat.
Dr. Niesten’s experience ranges from negotiating agreements with villagers in remote regions of Cambodia to designing a trust fund for the Sovi Basin in Fiji to training local NGOs in Liberia to securing finance from large private sector corporations. Strategies to ensure long-term viability of these initiatives include dedicated trust funds, targeted government programs for conservation and poverty alleviation, and sustainable nature-based enterprise. Prior to Conservation International, he worked as Senior Consultant at WEFA and as Associate with Hardner and Gullison Associates, where much of his work concentrated on feasibility studies and cost assessments for community conservation incentive agreements throughout the tropics. Dr. Niesten holds a PhD in Applied Economics, an MA in International Development Policy, and BAs in Quantitative Economics and International Relations from Stanford University.
Key Publications
Mora, M., E. Palacios, E., and E. Niesten. 2017.
“Assessing the impact of conservation agreements on threatened fish species: A case study in the Colombian Amazon.” Oryx 1-10.
