Since we last spoke in 2020, Greta F Iori has continued to expand her impact across conservation, not by stepping away from the frontline, but by deepening her work across systems, communities, and global movements.

In this conversation, she reflects on the growing complexity of conservation in Africa, the importance of honest, community-led approaches, and the urgent need to rethink how we address the interconnected challenges facing both people and wildlife.

From shaping large-scale strategies to championing women’s leadership and the role of art and culture in driving change, Greta’s work sits at the intersection of ecology, justice, and human connection, offering a powerful and deeply thoughtful perspective on what it truly takes to protect life on Earth today.

 

Since our last interview in 2020, what have been some of the most meaningful developments in your work and life?

One of the most meaningful developments in my work was designing and launching the Elephant Protection Initiative Foundation’s Human-Elephant Conflict Strategy. That work centred something I have always believed, which is that true coexistence between the world’s largest land mammal and people requires us to honour complexity. There is no universal, cookie-cutter solution. Every landscape carries its own histories, pressures, injustices, power dynamics, and realities. So the work had to be layered: grounded in local context, rooted in African realities, investing in governance and people, enabling local solutions, and engaging decision-makers at the highest level, because without political will, very little can last. This systems-based approach has remained one of the clearest expressions of my life’s work.

Another deeply meaningful chapter has been becoming a founding fellow of Women for the Environment Africa. What began as an emerging sisterhood has grown into a powerful network of 100 African women environmental leaders. For me, WE Africa has not simply been a network, but a home within the environmental movement — a place that has affirmed the power, legitimacy, and brilliance of African women’s leadership, and reminded me that doing things our way is often the path to the most lasting impact.

More recently, I have been leading partnerships and coalition-building work with Daughters for Earth, a global philanthropic fund working to mobilise significant resources behind women-led environmental action. It brings together so much of what I care about most: women’s leadership, systems change, resource justice, and long-term transformation rooted in those closest to the ground. Daughters for Earth has set out an ambition to raise $100 million to back women-led environmental efforts, grounded in the recognition that women remain dramatically underfunded despite their central role in climate and nature solutions.

At the time you were focused on tackling illegal wildlife trade and supporting community-led conservation. How has your work evolved since then?

In many ways, the heart of my work has not changed at all. I am still deeply committed to the people and places on the frontlines. I still work closely with governments, conservation practitioners, local actors, and communities, and I remain an active member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Specialist Group.

But my work and role have evolved into something broader: I see myself increasingly as a bridge between worlds — between local realities and global agendas, between frontline knowledge and high-level policy, between technical conservation and the deeper human questions of justice, belonging, leadership, and repair. I am even more committed now to revealing the interconnections beneath the visible crisis, because unless we address root causes, we simply move harm around.

Are there any recent projects or initiatives that feel especially important to you?

All of the work I am part of feels vital, but beyond any one project, what feels most important to me now is the deeper shift many of us in the environmental arena are being called into. We need to become more expansive and more integrated in how we think and act. We cannot keep treating illegal wildlife trade, human-wildlife conflict, gender inequity, governance failure, exclusion, and ecological collapse as separate issues. To me, they are all expressions of the same deeper fractures in how we relate to land, power, each other, and the living world.

What feels especially urgent is the courage to name the tensions, contradictions, exclusions, and unspoken realities that so often sit beneath the surface, but also the wonder, the magic, the emotions, art, culture, and traditions that give our lives meaning. One initiative I’m so proud to be a part of is The Great Elephant Migration — a public art and fundraising project that brings together life-sized elephant sculptures made by Indigenous artisans from India’s Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, using lantana camara, an invasive weed removed from elephant habitat. The project directs funds towards biodiversity protection and human-wildlife coexistence, while inviting people into a more emotional and imaginative relationship with elephants and the wider living world.

This work reminds us that art and culture are not secondary to conservation; they are part of how transformation truly happens. Data and policy matter enormously, but art can soften people into wonder, shift public consciousness, and help us feel our way back into relationship with the natural world. Sometimes that is what opens the door to care, and care is so often the beginning of real change. 

Has your thinking around community-driven conservation deepened or changed over the past few years?

Very much so. Communities remain at the heart of everything I do, because without local stewards, without frontline protectors leading and being meaningfully supported, and without local systems being strengthened, conservation efforts will almost always become unsustainable.

Nonetheless, I feel I have become even more wary of romanticising “community” as though it is automatically harmonious, equitable, or free from dysfunction. Communities, like all human systems, carry hierarchies, dysfunction, and imperfection. Pretending otherwise can be just as harmful as excluding people altogether.

So for me, community-driven conservation continues to mean being more honest. It means working with the real texture of people’s lives and social systems, not an idealised version of them. It means recognising both wisdom and rupture, both resilience and constraint. It means designing with people, but also being willing to name where power is uneven, where harm exists, and where change is needed within communities too. That honesty is essential if we want conservation to be durable, dignified, and genuinely just.

What conservation challenges in Africa concern you most right now?

What concerns me most is the continued deepening of pressures on land, water, biodiversity, and human dignity all at once — and the fact that these crises are still too often treated in silos.

Across Africa, we are seeing devastating and continued habitat fragmentation, rapid infrastructure expansion, extractive economic models, climate instability, governance failures, and growing inequality collide in ways that are intensifying both ecological breakdown and social strain. Human-wildlife conflict is rising in many places because land-use change, displacement, armed conflict, extreme poverty, and climate disruption are forcing both people and wildlife into impossible conditions. On top of this, we continue to see conservation models that still reproduce colonial patterns of exclusion — whether through imposed agendas, militarised approaches, or partnerships that speak the language of inclusion without truly redistributing real power. If conservation in Africa does not become more socio-politically honest, locally grounded, and structurally equitable, it will continue to struggle with legitimacy and durability.

And finally, I worry about fatigue, burnout, and deep trauma — the exhaustion of frontline people, local institutions, and environmental defenders who are being asked to hold together systems they did not break, often with far too little support, is simply heartbreaking. The wellbeing — both physical, but especially psychological and emotional — of environmental stewards and purpose-driven leaders is my utmost priority to invest time and effort in.

Have you seen any hopeful progress in the fight against illegal wildlife trade?

Yes, I have seen hopeful progress, though I think it is important to be honest that the challenge remains immense. What gives me hope is that the conversation has matured in some important ways. There is now greater recognition that illegal wildlife trade cannot be reduced to simplistic narratives about “bad poachers”. More people are beginning to understand that wildlife crime is a complex transnational system involving organised crime, demand markets, governance weaknesses, corruption, and structural inequality. That shift matters. It creates more room for nuanced responses that go beyond enforcement alone.

I have also seen progress in the rise of African-led leadership and expertise in tackling these issues, and in the increasing integration of coexistence, livelihoods, and local realities into conservation thinking. That said, there is still a long way to go. Hope, to me, lies not in pretending the fight is being won cleanly, but in the fact that more people are finally asking better questions.

Empowering women and youth in conservation was something you cared deeply about. Has that work expanded since 2020?

Absolutely — it has expanded significantly, and I would say it has become even more central to how I understand systems change.

Women and girls often carry some of the heaviest burdens of environmental decline and climate instability, yet they continue to be among the least resourced, least visible, and least institutionally supported. And still, they lead — in communities, in policy spaces, in movements, and in daily acts of stewardship that rarely make headlines.

My work with WE Africa and Daughters for Earth has deepened this conviction profoundly. Both are helping make visible what should already be obvious: that investing in women is not symbolic, it is strategic and vital to the future we’re in desperate need of.

Have there been any recent field experiences that reminded you why you do this work?

Last year, I had the immense privilege of travelling to Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of the Congo, Chinko in the Central African Republic, and Sangha Bai in CAR with African Parks, and it was one of those trips that marks you in ways that are hard to grasp in words.

There are moments when you stand in a landscape carrying immense ecological beauty and immense social pressure at the same time, and you truly feel the depth of grief and pain of the land, the people, but also the actors trying the best they can. One is reminded that conservation is truly some of the most difficult work there is because it is about safeguarding life itself for all of us. It is about memory, survival, governance, dignity, fear, love, compromise, and the daily negotiations people make with the living world around them.

One of the things that has stayed with me over the years is how often the communities most harmed continue showing up, despite how under-recognised and under-supported they are. Their endurance, intelligence, humour, and commitment are a constant reminder of why this work matters. And the more-than-human world itself does this too. Elephants, forests, rivers, birds — life keeps trying to regenerate, even amid immense loss and attack. That persistence moves me deeply. It reminds me that the work is not only necessary, but so very sacred in its own way. 

Outside of work, what continues to reconnect you most deeply to nature?

Love. I’m a hopeful romantic. Stillness. Birdsong. Water. Dance, movement, breath. The feeling of being returned to proportion by the living world.

Outside of work, what reconnects me most deeply is not always grand wilderness, though I am grateful for those moments too. Often it is something quieter: early morning light and meditation, the sound of birds insisting on life, the presence of trees, the sea, the beauty held in nostalgia, the simplicity of a cuddle and kiss, to experience pure love in a single moment. The ability to prioritise my inner wellbeing.

Nature reconnects me by reminding me that I am not separate from everything around me; we all belong to something older, wiser, and more intelligent than the systems humans have built. It brings me back to humility, to rhythm, and to surrendering to the unknown. In a world that can feel so loud, fractured, and extractive, that reconnection is essential.

What are your hopes for the next chapter of your work and impact?

My hope for the next chapter is to support those in powerful spaces to be well, to be just, to sit in the deep shadows of our inner world in order to influence our outer world. I hope to keep building bridges that help more people see themselves in the work of protecting life on Earth, and to do whatever I can to support my incredible community of environmental defenders around the world.

I will always continue contributing at the intersection of conservation, justice, storytelling, systems change, and women’s leadership, and I will always keep challenging narrow or outdated narratives within the environmental movement, while helping build new ones that are more honest, more relational, and more capable of holding complexity.

I also hope to keep creating spaces where people can speak the unspeakable — where contradiction, injustice, grief, joy, love, repair, and possibility can all be held together. Because I do not believe the future will be shaped only by better policies or better funding, but through relating to ourselves and each other more deeply, and hopefully finding magic and healing along the way.

Greta F Iori’s perspective is a powerful reminder that conservation is not a single discipline, but a deeply human, complex, and evolving practice that asks more of us than quick solutions or simple narratives.

Her work challenges us to look beyond surface-level fixes and to engage more honestly with the systems, relationships, and realities that shape both people and wildlife. It is in this space, where science meets story, and where policy meets lived experience, that meaningful change becomes possible.

As we continue to navigate an uncertain future for our planet, voices like Greta’s invite us not only to act, but to think, feel, and relate differently to the world around us.

 

If this conversation resonates with you, it’s a reminder that meaningful change often begins with small, conscious choices. At Wild In Africa, each bracelet is designed to connect you to the bigger picture, supporting ethical employment in South Africa while contributing to wildlife conservation projects across the continent. By choosing to wear one, you become part of a collective effort to protect the natural world and the communities that depend on it. It’s a simple way to carry the story forward and turn intention into impact. 

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