Michael BROMBACHER

Michael Brombacher is a trained environmental scientist. From 2001 to 2011 he worked and lived (since 2004) in Central Asia where he developed the Important Bird Areas Programme in the region on behalf of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) – BirdLife in the UK. For Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, he also supported the development of civil society conservation organisations to become a partner in the international network of BirdLife International. In addition, the “Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative”, a large-scale steppe and semi-desert landscape level conservation program emerged in these years which helped to protect large tracts of steppes and semi-deserts as well as it resulted into the recovery of the saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan. Since 2011 he heads the European Department of the Frankfurt Zoological Society. FZS focuses on safeguarding large-scale wilderness areas in temperate regions of Europe such as e.g. the Carpathians in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Romania, Polissia in Ukraine, Bialowieza forest in Poland as well as the steppes of Kazakhstan and wilderness sites in Germany.