About Louisa Richmond-Coggan
Is your organisation's technology decision-making as structured as it needs to be? Conservation organisations face real pressure to adopt technology, often without a clear process for assessing whether it fits their context, capacity, and conservation goals.
The free Conservation Technology Decision Quiz takes five minutes. It scores your approach across three areas: Decision Clarity, Fit and Feasibility, and Delivery and Performance. Results include practical recommendations matched to your score, so you can see where your decision process is strong and what to address first. Start here: Technology Decision Quiz
I work with conservation organisations and funders on structured technology decision-making, the process that determines whether adoption actually works. Twenty-five years in conservation across the Global South. Technology-agnostic, no vendor affiliations.
If your team is navigating a technology decision, evaluating a pilot, or funding organisations that are, I'd welcome a conversation.
BACKGROUND
Dr. Louisa Richmond-Coggan. My career spans field-based ecology, international NGO and policy work, academic leadership, and conservation technology decision-making.
Field career: large carnivore ecology and human-wildlife coexistence research across Eastern and Southern Africa, including as Head of Ecology at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. I led Namibia's National Leopard Census, a multi-stakeholder project whose results fed into national and international policy. I built the Carnivore Tracker app, the first of its kind in Namibia.
Institutional career: BirdLife International, UNEP-WCMC, TRAFFIC International, Earthwatch. Academic Dean at the School of Wildlife Conservation at the African Leadership University. Technology and innovation work with IUCN Tech4Nature, including leading three Innovation Challenge Workshops and contributing to the strategic guidance framework on conservation technology adoption.
The Navigating Web 3.0 Guide: A Tool for Conservation came out of that work. It is a decision-support tool that starts with your conservation goals and operational realities, not the technology. 34 guided questions assess which emerging technologies are worth exploring across four areas: data collection and management, resource allocation and financial management, collaboration and communication, and monitoring and evaluation. Now integrated into the IUCN GSAP SKILLS platform. This guide is where the decision-support work started, and it remains the clearest entry point into conservation technology decision-making for teams new to this field.
Research at the International Conservation Technology Conference, Lima in 2026 confirmed what I had been building toward: the gap in conservation technology is not the tools. It is the structured process for deciding whether, which, and how technology fits an organisation's context.
PhD, Nottingham Trent University. MSc Conservation Biology, Durrell Institute. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. IUCN WCPA Task Force on Human-Wildlife Coexistence. Member of the Nature Tech Collective and Top Tier Impact.
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ALASSANE GUEYE
Adjoint Inspecteur des eaux et forets de kédougou, Direction des Eaux et Forets, Chasses et Conservation des Sols(DEFCCS)
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Lovely to see your post and thank you for sharing these valuable insights and the tool you developed, Louisa! I particularly appreciate your emphasis on considering simpler alternatives before investing in technology, as well as planning for long-term sustainability.
Based on your experience, which of these five questions do you find conservation organisations tend to overlook most often?
I've added your post to our Capacity Development channel so that members following this topic will be notified and can benefit from your insights. Thanks again for contributing to our community!
Thank you so much, Thirza, and for adding it to the Capacity Development channel.
The one I see overlooked most often is what it will take to run the technology, not just to set it up. Plans and budgets tend to cover buying and installing the equipment, but much less often the batteries, repairs, data storage, staff time to check the equipment and analyse the data, end-of-life planning for the equipment, and what happens when the first grant ends. It's also coming through as one of the most common gaps in the early quiz answers.
I'd be really interested in what you see across the WildHub community. Is it similar for members, or do other questions come up more?
What a fantastic idea, thank you for sharing!
Hi Louisa, thank you for sharing your journey with us; it's wonderful to read where your conservation career has taken you! Amazing photos also. Your words on how collaboration is key to achieving conservation goals resonated with me. I think this point also comes up regularly in our members' reflections when they post their lessons learned. Feel free to add your lessons learned in one of our channels (perhaps the capacity building channel would be suitable?) and there is a new activity that we will be starting soon, called WildHub Fika, which may provide support while you wait to return to Namibia. Have a nice day!
Hi Thriza, thank you for the positive feedback on my intro, it really is appreciated! I have signed up to WildHub Fika, I think that it is a great initiative. Listening to Lindsey on the interview I was transported back to my days in Cambridge, we all used to meet weekly in a pub after work. It was a great way to get to know your fellow colleagues, to chat about our work, what we were all doing and possible overlaps and collaborations. When I left Cambridge, it was hard to leave this dynamic group and the buzz of our pub chats. I also really felt outside of the loop especially when you hear way down the line about new initiatives, collaborations and big ideas. It is great therefore that WildHub and Fika have created a fantastic opportunity for people everywhere to be connected so everyone can always be in the loop!