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Why we’re at Climate Week 2026

Arizona State University is returning to Climate Week this September, with faculty and staff taking part in events across New York City 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.

What is conservation leadership?

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.

But better technology doesn’t automatically lead to better conservation.

Someone still has to know how to interpret the data, recognize its limits and decide which tool fits the problem. Those are practical skills that can be learned.

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.

Kenya’s Tsavo landscape is defined by movement.

Elephants and other wildlife travel between Tsavo East and Tsavo West in search of food, water and seasonal habitat. Their routes cross thousands of square kilometers of land where people also raise livestock, farm and support their families.

Many conservation professionals spend years in the field before a promotion moves them into leadership, a role their science training never covered. The Future of Conservation Leadership course is built for them.

A program officer reads your narrative closely. Then they read your budget with a calculator, checking one document against the other.

That second reading is where proposals come apart. You can write a persuasive case for the work and still lose the award on a budget that looks approximate. The budget carries numbers a funder can test, against their own experience and against everything the narrative said the project would do, which makes it the part of the proposal that shows whether the plan is work or a wish.

Getting a good idea into the world often means taking on things like financing, budgeting, fundraising or managing uncertainty, sometimes for the first time when you’re already in the middle of doing the work.

The good news is, you don’t have to figure it all out on your own. These are skills you can learn. And who better to learn from than people who have been where you are and do this work every day?

That’s the idea behind four self-paced courses ASU Conservation Futures Academy, developed with Conservation International practitioners.

Gary Nabhan stepped out of a back hall into the event space at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, on a 97-degree July night, wearing the costume head of a horned lizard and a pair of black gloves.

His first words to the room, still wearing the head, were, “Does anybody know if they have ants at the coffee bar?” Then he took the head off, put his glasses on and decided he didn’t need the gloves after all. “It’s not gonna rain or snow, is it?” he asked, deadpan. “You never know.”

Karla Renteria used to spend her days connecting data centers across continents. Now she connects pineapple farmers in the Philippines to closets in Los Angeles.

The material she works with is called pineapple leather. After a harvest, the spiky pineapple leaves are usually burned or left to rot. Renteria's brand, EcoPersona, turns them into something you would carry to dinner.

Every conservation professional has watched a solid plan meet the field and lose. A budget line disappears. A permit slips a season. A funder changes its reporting terms halfway through.

The projects that still deliver are run by people who plan for that gap. Here are six skills that keep a project alive when the proposal and the field disagree.

People move into this field from ecology, data, geography and field research. You do not need every tool on day one, but you do need to understand how technology supports restoration planning. Here are the five stages a team works through.