Immersed in the wonders of the African bush from an early age, Lindy Rodwell (born 1962) has seen her work with the Endangered Wildlife Trust and the South African Crane Working Group from the early 1990s transformed into pan-African conservation groups that are protecting the critically endangered, highly symbolic wattled crane.
She attributes the project’s success to the “catalytic impact” of her 2002 Rolex Award, which enabled her African Crane Programme to grow to the point where it developed a life of its own. Today, she relies on a new generation to take the community-based crane and wetland conservation project forward.
Since 2008, Rodwell has focused on the development and implementation of a national human-capital development programme, GreenMatter. “The goal of the Rolex-funded programme was to identify, train and support key individuals whose efforts would drive crane and wetland conservation in central and southern Africa. My role now is to do exactly this for biodiversity in South Africa,” she says.
Published in 2012
