Sam Muller moderates a conversation with Diane Osgood, a pioneer in climate strategy, sustainability, and human rights; Freddy Kitoko, a lawyer, consultant, and expert in transitional justice; and Aaron Vermeulen, Global Finance Practice Lead at WWF.

Applying an integrated lens that connects governance, justice, conservation, and economic development, the conversation surfaces the challenges and opportunities of a more integrated approach — and, critically, new possibilities for action.

Note: Freddy Kitoko speaks in French — no translation or captions are provided — and appears without video due to bandwidth limitations.

Recorded on Thursday, May 21, 2025

MODERATOR
Sam Muller, Partner at Justice Compass Advisers; founding CEO of HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission; former Chair of WWF Netherlands.

A Dutch social entrepreneur and strategic adviser, Sam led the establishment of the International Criminal Court before founding HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission, both internationally recognized for advancing justice and conservation. He has advised governments, CEOs, and civil society leaders on governance reform, institutional transformation, and ESG strategy.

His contributions to justice and environmental protection earned him the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize and a Royal Decoration of the Netherlands (2024)

SPEAKERS
Diane Osgood is an environmental economist and sustainability strategist with more than 35 years of experience across corporate leadership, international consulting, and NGO governance. A recognised pioneer in the ESG field, she co-developed frameworks now in mainstream global use and has advised boards and C-suites at companies including DuPont, Monsanto, and Virgin Management Limited.

Diane has held senior leadership roles at Business for Social Responsibility and at Virgin Management, where she drove ESG integration across Virgin companies. She has provided evidence to UK Parliamentary proceedings on modern slavery and served as a Senior Advisor to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Aaron Vermeulen is the Finance Practice Lead for WWF-International and responsible for the sustainable finance strategy globally. Prior to this he was the head of Green Finance at WWF-NL and concurrently one of the founders of the Dutch Fund for Climate and Development (DFCD). Aaron also worked for five years as the WWF partnership manager at the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila. Before he held several positions, among others: director of the business group Water and Ecology for Royal HaskoningDHV consultancy in Amsterdam and as an associate expert for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Cairo.

For decades, environmentalists and climate scientists have warned about the catastrophic consequences of the shrinking and erosion of the Amazon and Congo rainforests. Politicians have echoed and amplified the warnings, but have done little of consequence to slow the actual pace at which the rainforests are moving towards tipping points.

The recent UN climate summit in Belem was supposed to change all that. However, it would take an unusually large dose of magical thinking to believe what happened at COP 30 will have much more impact than what happened at its twenty-nine predecessors, at least concerning the Amazon and Congo River Basins.

Maybe what’s needed is new thinking. Protecting the Amazon and the Congo isn’t just an environmental challenge but also a governance challenge, a justice challenge, and an economic development challenge. And stopping—or even slowing—the tipping probably requires bottom-up local action, not just top-down global declarations of intent.

To discuss potential new approaches, we gathered three people who have skin in the game: Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, Ugandan wildlife veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health; Dr. Fernando Trujillo, Colombian marine biologist and world-leading expert on river dolphins; and Sam Muller, Dutch lawyer with extensive experience in global justice and environmental practices.
Listen as they explore how to define and execute new approaches to saving the rainforests.

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This podcast episode is a recording of a live webinar and is also available to watch on YouTube for those who prefer a video format.

You can also find the New Thinking for a New World on your preferred platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Sam Muller, Partner at Justice Compass Advisers; founding CEO of HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission; former Chair of WWF Netherlands.
A Dutch social entrepreneur and strategic adviser, Sam led the establishment of the International Criminal Court before founding HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission, both internationally recognized for advancing justice and conservation. He has advised governments, CEOs, and civil society leaders on governance reform, institutional transformation, and ESG strategy.

His contributions to justice and environmental protection earned him the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize and a Royal Decoration of the Netherlands (2024)

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a Ugandan wildlife veterinarian and founder of two award-winning initiatives: Conservation Through Public Health, which promotes the coexistence of endangered mountain gorillas, other wildlife, and local communities; and Gorilla Conservation Coffee, a social enterprise that supports farmers living around gorilla habitats.
A pioneer of the One Health approach, she has led efforts to highlight the deep connections between human and wildlife wellbeing—work made especially urgent during the COVID-19 era. Her leadership and vision earned her the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize

Dr. Fernando Trujillo is a Colombian marine biologist and world-renowned expert on river dolphins. With an MSc in Environmental Sciences and a PhD in Zoology, he chairs the Small Cetacean Subcommittee of the International Whaling Commission and serves on multiple IUCN specialist groups. A prolific researcher with more than 300 publications, he has led major expeditions and advanced conservation science across aquatic ecology, endangered species, wetlands, and protected areas.
His groundbreaking contributions to science and conservation have earned him numerous honors, including the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

“The whale has no voice,” Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick. “But then again,” he went on, “What has the whale to say?”

Turns out he was wrong: not only do sperm whales have voices, but these massive, amazing mammals talk constantly to each other. They are humongous creatures: males can be 18 meters long and weigh 45 tons. Think something the weight of an industrial dump truck, but twice as long. Despite their massive size and the capacity to dive more than a mile into the depths of the ocean, they apparently are quite sociable.

How amazing would it be if we could decipher what they are saying? That’s the passion of David Gruber, a marine biologist and technologist who organized and leads Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative). He has gathered a team of 50 global scientists and technicians dedicated to understanding what the sperm whales are saying to each other—not so we can talk to them, but so that we can understand how they think about the world we share.

David is also one of the recipients of the 2025 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize, who was honored for his work with CETI and his underlying drive to help humans and nature co-exist.

Listen as he discusses what drives him and CETI.

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You can also find the New Thinking for a New World on your preferred platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Climate change is—by definition—both global and local at the same time. Arguably, that dual reality is a core reason why humanity has struggled to make the transformations needed to bend the arc of our planet’s evolution in ways that benefit most people in most places.

The UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil, is only the most recent proof point. Worrying about Everything Everywhere All at Once doesn’t work: it overloads both global and local political circuits.

So let’s focus on two regions whose trajectories will determine the fate of much of the planet: the Amazon and the Congo River Basins. If those Basins continue moving in the wrong direction, the consequences for people in the Americas, Africa, and Europe will be catastrophic. Almost no one disputes that.

Protecting the Amazon and the Congo isn’t just an environmental challenge—it is equally a governance challenge, a justice challenge, and an economic development challenge. And unless these are addressed together, at the local level, no global plan will be enough. Decades of largely top-down strategies have not delivered the needed results. As recent analysis shows, saving these basins will require more bottom-up approaches that intentionally integrate three foundations: rule of law and governance, economic development and conservation, and climate action.

We want to discuss new thinking emerging from both Basins that emphasizes this: building change from the ground up, strengthening local institutions, supporting community-led governance, creating legal and accountable frameworks, and anchoring sustainable economic opportunities within ecological restoration.

Date: Tuesday, December 9
Time: 10 am EST / 4:00 pm CEST
Add the event to your calendar: https://evt.to/pbqq88d91z4n

Moderator:

Sam Muller, Partner at Justice Compass Advisers; founding CEO of HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission; former Chair of WWF Netherlands.

A Dutch social entrepreneur and strategic adviser, Sam led the establishment of the International Criminal Court before founding HiiL and the Wildlife Justice Commission, both internationally recognized for advancing justice and conservation. He has advised governments, CEOs, and civil society leaders on governance reform, institutional transformation, and ESG strategy.

His contributions to justice and environmental protection earned him the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize and a Royal Decoration of the Netherlands (2024)

Featured Panelists:

Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is a Ugandan wildlife veterinarian and founder of two award-winning initiatives: Conservation Through Public Health, which promotes the coexistence of endangered mountain gorillas, other wildlife, and local communities; and Gorilla Conservation Coffee, a social enterprise that supports farmers living around gorilla habitats.

A pioneer of the One Health approach, she has led efforts to highlight the deep connections between human and wildlife wellbeing—work made especially urgent during the COVID-19 era. Her leadership and vision earned her the 2022 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize

Dr. Fernando Trujillo is a Colombian marine biologist and world-renowned expert on river dolphins. With an MSc in Environmental Sciences and a PhD in Zoology, he chairs the Small Cetacean Subcommittee of the International Whaling Commission and serves on multiple IUCN specialist groups. A prolific researcher with more than 300 publications, he has led major expeditions and advanced conservation science across aquatic ecology, endangered species, wetlands, and protected areas.

His groundbreaking contributions to science and conservation have earned him numerous honors, including the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize.

By almost every objective indicator, the process of dramatic climate change grinds on. However, the optimists are currently making a big deal out of the notion that warming might top out between 2.5 and 3°C over pre-industrial levels, compared to earlier and much higher scenarios. And Bill Gates now assures us that it is poverty, not climate change, that is potentially catastrophic.

No one should be reassured!  

When it comes to the environment, what people around the world need is reliable, fact-based information about how the places in which they live are actually changing. They need to be empowered with accessible science, and the voices and knowledge of those directly impacted by environmental change amplified in ways that could actually produce positive outcomes.

Thank God for something called Mongabay. Rhett Ayers Butler founded and built Mongabay as a global digital platform for high-quality journalism about the environment. He and they have deservedly won endless journalism awards. Far more importantly, Mongabay is practically the only reliable source for consistently objective reporting on conservation and the environment on a global basis.

Butler is a world-class conservationist and journalist. He is also one of the recipients of the 2025 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize Winners. 

Listen as Rhett talks about the world as he reports on it….

Thirty years ago, the United Nations challenged the political leaders of the world to do something about global warming. The politicians responded as politicians always do: they convened meeting after meeting, talked endlessly and—of course—agreed to keep on meeting. Rinse and repeat, year after year, even as the warming and its impacts became more obvious and more consequential.

Why? Effective global governance is largely a joke in a world organized around nation-states and characterized by dramatic inequality of power and by great power tension. Sweeping, top-down proposed solutions to global challenges inevitably fail. Sadly, there is no reason to expect a different outcome from the upcoming COP 30 in Belém, Brazil…but the beat goes on.

Like frogs in slowly boiling water, are we condemned to a future of cascading ecological disasters? Is there a better approach?

Linwood Pendleton, founding executive director of the Ocean Knowledge Network, thinks there might be. Although he has spent more than his share of time trying to make the global system produce better outcomes, he is increasingly persuaded that the better possibilities come from indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and science. There are solutions, he insists; we are just looking for them in the wrong places.

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You can also find the New Thinking for a New World on your preferred platform, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. 

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Linwood Pendleton is a researcher at the University of Western Brittany.  He connects ocean professionals and Indigenous academics around the world. He is the Global Coordinator of the Ocean Knowledge Action Network (a global network of ocean professionals), the Science Director of the Moonjelly Foundation (focused on knowledge sharing among Indigenous academics), and holds the International Chair of Excellence at the European Institute for Marine Studies. He served on the Executive Planning Committee and the Interim Advisory Board for the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and now serves on the Advisory Board of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He was the Senior Vice-President for Science at the Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution: Ocean, Global Lead for Ocean Science at the Worldwide Fund for Nature, and Acting Chief Economist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. When he is not in the field, he is probably at home in coastal Brittany, France, where he and his family are in the midst of restoring an old, stone auberge.

Why slow motion? Partly lack of political will, but partly because climate strategies are typically driven from the top-down, starting with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and those strategies have not delivered since the planet is evidently warming at an accelerating pace. That reality—and the corollary that it’s long past time to look for potentially more impactful bottom-up strategies—was the motivating idea behind the recent Tällberg Foundation “Two Basins Workshop: Integrating Nature and Governance,” which was supported by Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and hosted by the Universidad de los Andes at their Cartagena, Colombia campus.

Photo: Tanîa Trindade and Roseline C. Beudels-Jamar

Under the leadership of Tällberg’s Sam Muller and Alan Stoga, a group of international scholars and practitioners gathered for three days of conversation aimed at producing new thinking about how to empower local communities in the Amazon and the Congo to design and implement policies and programs that could reduce the chance that the world’s two greatest rainforests eventually become savannah.

“We know that what needs to be done to save the rainforests is not happening and we know that it’s not happening because of governance failures,” said Sam Muller, a Dutch-based jurist who received the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize in 2022. “Our task was to imagine new approaches that are embedded in local realities, realistically combining rule of law, accountability and dispute resolution. This is about creating conditions that empower, incentivize, and allow local communities to do what we all need them to do.”

The group who convened in Cartagena included a (small) Noah’s Ark of scientists, jurists, conservationists, economic and political specialists, and others with deep experience in the Two Basins as well as other endangered areas like the Southeast Asian and the Arctic boreal forests. Participants in the workshop included three past Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Prize laureates. In addition to Muller, Fernado Trujillo (2024) and Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka (2022) were in Cartagena; Tero Mustonen (2021) was represented by his colleague, Noora Huusari.

Photo: Fernando Trujillo

As Alan Stoga, Tällberg’s chairman put it, “We were looking for practical ways to combine good environmental policy with effective jurisprudence, solid incentives, and governance at the local level in the rainforests. We thought if we could do that and if we could imagine how to do so at scale, we might inject some hope into an otherwise bleak outlook.”

So, did hope win? Muller is not yet ready to declare victory. “We coalesced around a ‘hot spot’ approach. These would be carefully selected, relatively small geographical areas in the Amazon and in the Congo Basin where urgent action is needed to protect biodiversity, slow climate change, support local economies, and to strengthen justice as it is actually delivered.” As imagined by the workshop participants, these hot spots would experiment with new, incentive-driven economic initiatives, with people-focused justice processes, and with community-based governance rooted in their own realities. Hot spots could gradually be linked to each other to become engines of change, not just isolated projects, that eventually impact national and international policies.

Critical to the approach that began to emerge in Cartagena is a positive, active role for the private sector. “Every meeting on climate seems to end with a plea for massive government spending which, of course, doesn’t happen,” said Stoga. “That only leaves the private sector, and I was delighted with the positive conversations I heard about how to create conditions where responsible, profit-driven firms become a significant part of the solution. This is especially relevant for the Congo Basin which seems to hold significant amounts of the minerals and resources needed for the world’s Green Transition—and which are going to be exploited, one way or the other.”

Photo: Sam Muller

What happens next?  

“We have started to develop the ‘hot spot’ concept, to define what we know and what we don’t (but need) to know, and to look for promising communities and existing initiatives that could be launching pads,” said Stoga. “We only got this far only because of SNF’s support.” Muller added, “We are talking about systemic change; I believe the only way to save the rainforests is to flip the governance paradigm on its head—and to do it fast and at scale. We have only just begun, but it was a great beginning.”

From small acorns, great oak trees can grow…. 

The Congo River Basin includes six countries and covers approximately 3.7 million square kilometers, making it the world’s second-largest rainforest basin behind the Amazon. Like the Amazon, in practical terms, it is vital to the health of the planet. Also like the Amazon, scientists and conservationists worry that the Basin’s ecology could tip if its rainforests are seriously degraded.

Unlike the Amazon, however, the immediate threat to the ecological integrity of the Congo Basin is not large-scale agriculture, but the demands of the Green Transition, since the region seems to hold vast reserves of minerals and rare earths. Could the rush to “electrify everything” lead to the destruction of the Congo rainforest?

This week, we have the opportunity for a conversation with someone who is deeply invested in trying to guide the countries of the Congo toward a positive future. Jaap van der Waarde has worked for the last two decades in the Congo Basin and is now the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Director for the region. He spoke with New Thinking for a New World in his personal capacity.

What do you think? Comment below. 

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Jaap and Alan spoke at the “Two Basins Workshop: Integrating Nature and Governance” hosted by Universidad de los Andes in Cartagena, Colombia. The workshop was made possible by Tällberg Foundation’s lead supporter, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
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Find the New Thinking for a New World podcast on a platform of your choice (Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Youtube, etc.)

ABOUT OUR GUEST
Jaap van der Waarde has worked since 2024 with WWF-International as Conservation Director for the Congo Basin. Previously, he worked for 5 years as the TRIDOM Landscape Manager, a transboundary landscape in the Congo Basin. He previously spent nine years with WWF-Netherlands, working in the Species and Landscape Conservation Program with a focus on the Congo Basin. Between 2004 and 2010, he worked in Cameroon on natural resources management, the last 2 years with the WWF in Cameroon as regional adviser for the regional CARPO program, active in 5 countries in the Congo Basin region.

Earlier in his career, he worked with Bioclear, a leading consultancy firm in environmental biotechnology in the Netherlands. He holds an MSc in Biology from Groningen University, the Netherlands.

Global meetings on climate change almost always turn on two factors: political will and money. Even when the will is present, the money is not—and the result for decades has been the seemingly endless, accelerating slide toward a hotter, more volatile, climate.

Each year the big international climate meetings like the 2025 COP to be held in Belém, Brazil in November produce ever larger estimates of the financing needed to move away from fossil fuels, to compensate developing countries for loss and damage, to sustain biodiversity, etc. Each year governments are more and more stretched to meet growing social, defense, and endless other needs and less and less willing to even to pretend they can find the vast sums needed to slow, stop, or reverse the climate change spiral.

That only leaves the private sector as source of finance. However, many climate activists distrust private capital or seek to create conditions that deny businesses the opportunity to earn competitive returns on their investments. But without private money OR enough public money…there simply isn’t enough money.

So, whether or not it’s possible for a profit making enterprise to do the right things for the environment while making a decent return on their investment is critical to the future of the planet.

For insight, we went to the front lines of climate change, the Congo River Basin, one of the two “lungs” of the planet. SODEFOR is a forestry company in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that manages a million hectares of forest. They have a well documented record of operating legally and responsibly in the rainforest. Tânia Trindade plays a key role in managing the company’s commitment to its shareholders as well as to the planet; she deeply believes that SODEFOR can do both.

Listen as she describes the challenges of operating in a complex environment as SODEFOR tries to do good and to do well at the same time.

What do you think: if the public sector won’t find the resources to mitigate climate change, is there a viable role for the private sector? Or should we just give up?

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Tania and Alan spoke at the “Two Basins Workshop: Integrating Nature and Governance” in Cartagena, Colombia. The workshop was made possible by Tällberg Foundation’s lead supporter, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). 

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Find the New Thinking for a New World podcast on a platform of your choice (Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Youtube, etc.)

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Tânia Trindade is Strategic Adviser to the CEO of SODEFOR, a major forestry company in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She leads high-level decision-making, government and community engagement, and strategic initiatives focused on sustainable forestry and conservation.

Originally trained as an aerospace engineer at Portugal’s Instituto Superior Técnico, Tânia transitioned from managing global aerospace and smart grid projects to working in forestry. Over the past decade in the DRC, she has overseen social and environmental programs, led logistics and operations, and helped launch KFBS, a forest conservation company advancing the group’s sustainability goals.

Tânia’s work bridges technical acumen with a deep commitment to environmental stewardship and community resilience in one of the world’s most critical ecosystems.

In 2019, Carlos Nobre, a leading Brazilian scientist, published an open letter entitled “Amazon tipping point: Last chance for action.” If that article were published today, it might have to be titled, “No more chances” because the past five years have seen record-breaking drought throughout the region as well as record-breaking forest fires.

Indeed, from a distance it looks like large parts of the rainforest are now tipping towards grasslands, with potentially devastating consequences for regional and global rain and weather patterns. Can what is still left—essentially the northern slice from the Atlantic to the Andes—be saved?

Francisco von Hildebrand (Pacho) thinks it can. As someone who essentially grew up in the Amazon and now as leader of Gaia Amazonas, he has a key role to play in the struggle to support the Indigenous people living in the Amazon who are critical to keeping what’s left of the rainforest intact.

Listen as Pacho explains why he believes the Amazon can still be saved. Tell us what you think in the comments below.

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Find the New Thinking for a New World podcast on a platform of your choice (Apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, Youtube, etc.)

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Francisco (Pacho) von Hildebrand is a third-generation leader and director of Gaia Amazonas, he has dedicated his life to safeguarding the Amazon rainforest and defending the rights of Indigenous communities. His legacy has been recognized with prestigious awards.

His contribution lies in finding a balance between Indigenous knowledge, solutions, and governance, and Western strategies. This approach has set a new standard for development in ecologically sensitive areas. Furthermore, it has established a new benchmark for innovative development frameworks in ecologically sensitive regions around the world.

His experience and background have had a significant impact through his involvement on the boards of RAISG and the North Amazon Alliance (ANA), playing a key role in protecting over 2 million square kilometers of the Amazon Basin.