Terry Townshend is a Beijing-based conservation and climate change expert with specific expertise on legislation, wildlife conservation and China. Formerly lead author, now co-author, of the annual Climate Legislation Study in partnership with the London School of Economics, he has presented the findings in the US Senate, Chinese National People’s Congress, Japanese Diet, South Korean National Assembly, Mexican Congress, and the UK Parliament. In 2017, in partnership with Chinese NGO ShanShui Conservation Center, he devised and set up a community-based wildlife watching tourism project with yak herders on the Tibetan Plateau, focusing on snow leopards. Terry is passionate about public engagement on biodiversity and set up projects to track two of Beijing’s most iconic birds—the Beijing Swift and the Beijing Cuckoo—both of which were found to migrate to southern Africa for the northern winter, attracting media coverage, including front page of the New York Times. He runs the Birding Beijing website (www.birdingbeijing.com) and works to save some of China’s rarest birds from extinction, including Jankowski’s Bunting and Baer’s Pochard. In 2018 he became a Fellow of the Paulson Institute, advising their conservation program, and in 2019, he was invited by the Beijing Municipal government to be a consultant on a project to “rewild” Beijing.
