New Guest Speakers Announced: People for Planet Summit

Explore solutions to save nature with award-winning conservationists and leaders in technology, finance and science.

Whitley Fund for Nature’s second People for Planet Summit on 8 October at London’s Royal Institution will gather Whitley Award-winning conservationists and other global experts working to protect and restore nature.

Held at the famous auditorium where Thomas Henry Huxley defended Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, this one-day event explores solutions to protect and restore the natural world, and how nature is already adapting to our changing planet.

GUEST speakers

Our first guest speaker joining the summit line-up is Dr Drew Purves, Nature Lead at Google DeepMind, for a fireside chat and Q&A on the potential for new technologies, including AI, in conservation.

This will span new frontiers in bio-acoustics, monitoring species through sounds, to how mapping the biosphere with AI could create a gold standard for habitats to guide decisions on protected areas – such as tropical rainforests.

Deforestation is rising and could push the world’s most important tropical rainforest – the Amazon – to become a net emitter of carbon, destabilising the climate globally.

As the milestone COP30 in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil approaches, Executive Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Professor Alexandre Antonelli from Brazil, will make the connection between nature and climate and set the global context.

DR DREW PURVES

Drew has a 25-year history in quantitative and computational ecology, with a focus on utilising and developing new methods to map, understand, and forecast ecosystems, at scales from local to global.

He also actively encourages and mentors upcoming generations of researchers. In his current role, he has responsibility for a growing portfolio of nature-focused projects at Google DeepMind, a world-leading AI research lab committed to building AI responsibly for the benefit of humanity.

Prior to Google DeepMind, Drew spent 18 years in ecological research and environmental data science at the University of Cambridge, University of York, Princeton, and at Microsoft Research Cambridge, leading and collaborating with different groups of scientists, universities and NGOs. Drew joined Google DeepMind in 2015.

PROFESSOR ALEXANDRE ANTONELLI

Alexandre studies the distribution, evolution, conservation and sustainable uses of species and develops methods to speed up scientific discovery and innovation.

He has published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and he has been named on the Web of Science ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list, which identifies pioneering researchers in the top 1% of their field, every year since 2020.

He is also Professor in Biodiversity and Systematics at the University of Gothenburg, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and a Distinguished Scientist and Visiting Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He is a Trustee of WWF International, the President and Co-Founder of the Antonelli Foundations for Biodiversity Research and Conservation, Principal Investigator of the Atlantic Forest Research and Conservation Alliance, Founder of the Hidden Universe: Biodiversity initiative and member of the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits.

His book, The Hidden Universe – Adventures in Biodiversity, was published in 2022.

FULL PROGRAMME ANNOUNCED

Meet the five internationally renowned Whitley Award winners already announced to join us at our People for Planet Summit – each demonstrating that with leadership and collaboration, nature can recover.

Dive into our full People for Planet Summit programme featuring 16 experts from 10 countries—across 7 flagship talks, panels, interviews and an evening of storytelling—at London’s historic Royal Institution.

From tracking species from space to looking at how Big Finance can close the $700 billion annual nature finance gap, explore solutions to protect and restore nature with Whitley Award winners and other leaders in science, technology, finance, and the arts.