Our survival depends on nature 

At the most basic level, nature provides us with clean air, water, healthy soils, and raw materials that form the basis of economic activity. 

• Nature helps to combat global warming and climate change — it absorbs around 50 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions.
• Nature mitigates natural disasters — regions with healthy ecosystems suffer less when natural disasters occur.
• Nature is linked to tackling poverty — developing countries depend disproportionately on nature for subsistence, and conservation can be a route out of poverty

Working together to protect the future

Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) brings together the University of Cambridge and nine leading international biodiversity conservation organisations at a flagship conservation campus—The David Attenborough Building. Our shared goal is to find solutions to end the degradation of our most essential resources and to build a better, more equal future for the world’s inhabitants.

Together, we can tackle challenges to biodiversity, and the wealth of 'natural capital' it represents, in ways that cannot be achieved by any partner alone. 

At CCI, academic research and on-the-ground conservation converge to yield transformational approaches to the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. We are uniquely placed to feed new thinking and training into worldwide conservation practice and policy through partner conservation organisations and their networks.

Similarly, the experience, knowledge and information from on-the-ground policy implementation and practice inform CCI's research and teaching.