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Women don’t need to be fixed to become stronger leaders. They need opportunities to connect, support one another and build alliances. Ahead of the Women in Conservation Leadership Retreat, we explore why bringing women together can help reshape leadership and strengthen conservation.

One year after Jane Goodall's death, the Jane Goodall Institute USA closed Climate Week NYC with a reception in her honor. ASU's Conservation Futures Academy team took the opportunity to reflect on Jane’s global legacy and our part in carrying it forward.

After a week of conversations with conservation organizations and practitioners at Climate Week NYC 2026, ASU is opening nominations for two programs designed around the challenges experienced conservation leaders are navigating.

A year after a conversation at Climate Week NYC, Nia Tero and ASU returned with a new course focused on Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the care of Mother Earth in Latin America and the Caribbean. The new course is part of broader work underway, including Indigenous Conservation Collaborations, one of the most popular courses offered by the Conservation Futures Academy.

For generations, Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon have protected its rivers, reciprocating the care Mother Earth gives them. Today those rivers hold mercury, left behind by illegal gold miners who use it to extract gold from sediment. The Minamata Convention, a global treaty on mercury, is one of the tools Indigenous Peoples can use to defend those waters. 

ASU is a Nature Hub partner this year, joining the One Ocean, One Climate plenary at Climate Week NYC as it expands learning for working professionals and launches new degree pathways for the next generation of conservation practitioners. The blue economy offers one example of how conservation jobs are changing.

A year after ASU announced Conservation Futures at Climate Week NYC, the work is taking shape through partnerships that help determine what people learn, how they put that learning into practice and how those opportunities reach more people.

Climate Week NYC is underway, bringing people from across sectors to New York to talk about what comes next for climate action. ASU Conservation Futures is here for the week, with a home base at The Nest Climate Campus and a partnership with the Nature Hub.

With just over three years left, meeting global conservation commitments by 3030 will require more than ambitious targets. It will require people with the knowledge and skills to do the work. That is the conversation ASU Conservation Futures is bringing to Climate Week from Sept. 20–27.

You can read a landscape and its data, but getting it protected depends on funders, agencies and communities moving together. That coordination is conservation leadership, and it can be learned.

Let's start with the definition.

Satellites monitor ecosystems from space. Drones map landscapes in hours instead of days. GIS helps conservation teams understand where to restore habitat, reduce risk and protect biodiversity. Artificial intelligence is opening new ways to analyze information at a scale that wasn’t possible just a few years ago.

Picture a conservation team at work on Indigenous land. Over a season, they map a river, log a rare plant, write down an elder's account of where the water used to run and mark a cultural site on a shared map. By the end, they hold a small archive about a community and its home.