Interview with WWF chief James Leape

Champion of the environment
Business Times 1 Mar 08;

WWF chief James Leape once brought lawsuits against the Reagan administration, but now fights for nature in a different way, MATTHEW PHAN finds out

JAMES LEAPE, director-general of WWF International, tells the tale of how he was on a boat in the Eastern Pacific two months ago with the vice-chairman of Wal-mart, the giant American retailer that accounts for a third of grocery sales in the region. They were looking at a fisherman who was changing the hooks on his lines, so as not to catch too many turtles.

'The guy from Wal-mart turns to me and says, we should be buying his fish,' relates Mr Leape, who is narrating with obvious relish the anecdote late into our one-hour interview. 'Yes, absolutely. If Wal-mart says to these fishermen, 'If you do it right, we will favour your products', then they're all yours, they're ready for that kind of a deal.'

'That kind of a deal' - his terminology reflects Mr Leape's background as an environmental lawyer. In the 1980s he brought a suit against the Reagan administration, preventing the construction of a large oil port in the Bering Sea wilderness. Shrewd deal-making, today, is very much what the WWF is about, notwithstanding its image as a lobby group. This is not really zero-sum game deal-making in the conventional corporate sense, but rather finding solutions in which all stakeholders - from the fishermen, to the local governments, retailers, consumers, and, the voiceless victim in so many cases, the oceans - will benefit.

Take for example another incident in 2006, when the WWF lobbied successfully against the location of a large palm oil plantation in the heart of Borneo, some 220,000 square kilometres worth of virgin tropical rainforest on an island divided among three countries: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. One of the largest virgin tracts of forest left in the world, it hosts up to 6 per cent of the world's biodiversity and is a watershed for 14 of the islands' 20 major rivers, according to the WWF.

Chinese investors planned a 1.8 million hectare plantation along the mountainous inland border of Kalimantan, or Indonesian Borneo. Mr Leape met Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his Ministry of Forests, pushing his organisation's case that the palms should be planted on already deforested land elsewhere.

In context, the WWF had been working for a long time with local governments in Borneo around forest conservation, he says. 'Along comes the proposal for a plantation. Our role was to help highlight - to decision-makers, governments, financiers, communities - the impact such a project would have on forest and communities, and on development objectives.'

In this case, he says, there was the option of putting the plantation on land already cleared. It was financially better for investors, and also from both an economic development and a conservation perspectives. 'Our role is to marshal those facts and marshal players around those alternative options,' Mr Leape says.

Natural path

James Leape is now 49 years old, and has worked for environmental causes pretty much his entire career. 'When I was in school, the vanguard of environmental protection in the US was manned by lawyers. They were in the courts, in the Congress, on the forefront of advancing environmental protection. So it was a natural path for me,' he says.

Tall, lanky, intense in argument, and somewhat stern, here he breaks into an impish smile: 'Aside from the fact that I thought law would be fun...'

He is the sort that when you ask about soy in Brazil, involuntarily rolls his eyes, then launches into a diplomatic, carefully worded discourse about 'engaging with the soy industry and government in the management of the soy and beef sectors'. Clearly, the lawyer's caution is very much in place, but there is the occasional crack, delightful for this reporter.

Mr Leape worked in litigation for several years, advancing environmental causes through the courts, he says. But in the 1980s, he spent some time in Kenya working for the UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Programme. 'That work really shifted my focus to global conservation,' he says. 'I recognised that the problems we deal with are really global, and that law in itself is limited as a tool for advancing conservation.'

After returning from Nairobi, he retreated to teach in law school in Colorado and Utah for about three years, writing a textbook on environmental law (here he again gives the offhand smile that accompanies the slight digressions). Then, in 1989, he joined WWF in the US because 'if you care about global conservation, then WWF is the best place to be'.

He served as executive vice-president of its international conservation programmes for about a decade, following which he left for a few years to join another foundation, 'a chance to get a different perspective on all this'. But, Mr Leape says, 'I have a panda branded on my heart' (smile), and when the WWF asked him to return as its director-general in 2005, 'it was a no brainer'.

Mr Leape is just the fourth director-general of the WWF, which was founded in 1962. He is the only lawyer so far - his three predecessors have been a journalist, an economist and a wildlife biologist.

Today, the WWF - which stands not for World Wildlife Fund, the original name, but rather World Wide Fund for Nature, a name adopted in 1986 to reflect the broader nature of its work - is heavily involved in what Mr Leape calls 'lightening humanity's footprint on the planet'.

Conservation of biodiversity is one extremely important aspect of this, as is fighting climate change by tackling greenhouse gas emissions. 'Many of the things we care about will be lost if we do not focus on climate change, so it is right to make that the central priority,' says Mr Leape. 'At the same time, the growing recognition of climate change brings in its wake an awareness that the way we are living has implications for our long-term survival. It's not just about the climate, but the way we use water and fish and forests. People are beginning to respond in terms of broader awareness.'

It's not just wildlife that benefits. You might get a short-term gain out of overfishing, but that would disappear if you wipe out the stocks of the eco-system on which other stocks depend. According to Mr Leape, 'one of the things you see in the last several years is a growing recognition of the real convergence between these interests'.

The WWF's strategy, he says, is to focus on leverage points where it can really bring large-scale change. Thus, it targets key regions of biodiversity, which are home to a large proportion of the world's species and critical to the smooth functioning of eco-systems that span the globe. It analyses the social and economic forces threatening nature, and tries to find ways to align the interests of all parties concerned.

For example, as head of international conservation, Mr Leape worked on two initiatives that he is still immensely proud of.

The first is helping to set up the Marine Stewardship Council in 1997 as a joint effort between the WWF and Unilever, the world's largest buyer of seafood. The MSC, an independent non-profit organisation, accredits fisheries that use sustainable principles and techniques, and persuade consumers to buy MSC-certified products.

'It is really changing the market for fish and driving changes in the way fish are caught, and the way we relate to the oceans. Fisheries are the largest single proximate threat to the oceans - climate change is a broader threat - so if you can begin to harness the market as a force for good in fishing, that's powerful,' says Mr Leape.

The second initiative is his work in the Amazon. The WWF organised a global campaign asking governments to commit to protect 10 per cent of their forests. As part of the campaign, it approached then-president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to ask if he was willing to do so, which he was. The WWF at the time had an alliance with the World Bank, and the pair arranged financing in support of Brazil's commitment. The country put together a programme that when finished will result in the protection of some 50 million hectares of the Amazon, making it one of the biggest protected areas in the world.

'We worked hand-in-glove with the government and donors to make that programme a success. We are more than half-way there, protected areas are really happening on the ground,' Mr Leape says.

At the same time, the WWF is growing a trust fund, 'so that if the protection of areas is in doubt in the future, we will have staff on the ground managing those parks', he says. 'That's the kind of scale you need to get to if you're serious about the long-term conservation of places like the Amazon. It's not all it takes to save the Amazon but it's a really important piece of the puzzle.'

Scientific approach

In all cases, the WWF's approach is science-based and focused on solutions. It works with communities and local partners, complemented by engagement with larger actors like governments or regional institutions. It brings technical experience from similar projects elsewhere, combining this with local knowledge and networks. 'In the end, we try to be catalytic. We work with partners like communities and governments. In the long-term, action has to be in their hands,' says Mr Leape.

Sure, there are sceptics out there concerned only about the next quarter's results, but 'in every sector, there are leaders who see the importance of the issue', says Mr Leape. 'We look to work with those people.'

The problem is that there are not enough of them. 'The greatest single challenge of this moment is that while we recognise broadly that climate change is important, we have not yet internalised how truly urgent it is, and how boldly we have to act over the next several years if we are to be successful,' he says.

This reporter cannot help but ask, given the lawyer's battle scars in the US courts, whether there are cycles to the country's environmental conscience. The US, after all, helped to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol in the mid-1990s, yet failed to ratify it, and at a UN conference in Bali last December nearly scuppered agreement on a two-year roadmap that will help establish a system of tackling carbon emissions after Kyoto expires in 2012.

There is hope. While President George Bush's 'stubborn resistance' has so far hobbled federal efforts at tackling the issue, 'there is no question the next administration will be much, much stronger on climate change', says Mr Leape. The most important message from Bali is to look forward to the next delegation that will be in Copenhagen in 2009, he says. 'That will be a very different delegation, and the negotiations need to be conducted with that delegation in mind.'