Stuart is widely regarded as a global leader in the field of business and biodiversity management with over 35 years working on extractive sector related biodiversity management and conservation issues. For 22 of those years, he led Rio Tinto’s ground breaking work on Net Positive Impact on biodiversity. As a founding member of initiatives such as the Business and Biodiversity Offset program (BBOP) and the Cross Sector Biodiversity Initiative he played an important role in mainstreaming the use of the mitigation hierarchy and biodiversity offsets of a means of achieving the goal on net gain on biodiversity.
As a co-author of government (Australian Government leading practice guidance on biodiversity management) and industry (CSBI Good practise for the collection of biodiversity baseline data) Stuart is acutely aware of the critical need to design management tools that are not only grounded in good robust science principles but are applicable to industry context in which they are being applied.
Over the last two years Stuart has been actively contributing to the design and implementation of the global goal of nature Positive. He is currently working with an Australian based philanthropic foundation to develop the tools and methodologies that will enable extractive organisations to achieve nature positive outcomes. He is a co-author on a soon to be publish paper that details an innovative Nature Positive model for the mining sector.
Stuart maintains a strong belief that cross sector collaboration has a critical role to play in solving the world ‘biodiversity loss’ crisis. He is committed to the continued development of the concept of Nature Positive (including No Net Loss approaches) as a conservation framework that can positively contribute to societal moves to stem this loss.