New York, March 25, 2024 – The following announcement was released today by Joe Walston, Executive Vice President of WCS Global:

“I am delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Stacy Jupiter to lead WCS Marine Conservation. Stacy is currently WCS Regional Director for the Melanesia program and was the outstanding candidate after a long and thorough global recruitment effort.

“Stacy, who has been with WCS since 2008, is a globally recognized marine scientist and conservationist, with an exceptional set of transdisciplinary skills. With a background in ecology, geography and geochemistry and degrees from Harvard University and University of California, Santa Cruz, Stacy has spent the last 16 years helping build effective, lasting and equitable marine conservation programs. She has been a champion of the locally-managed marine area (LMMA) approach, and a pioneer of integrated watershed management for downstream coral reef health and public health. Her co-design of ridge-to-reef and community-based fisheries management programs with local Indigenous partners and governments have influenced WCS’s global strategic approach. In 2019, in recognition of these outstanding achievements, Stacy was recognized with a prestigious MacArthur Fellow award.

“Stacy has published extensively on broad ranging ocean issues, including small-scale fisheries, threatened species management, climate adaptation and resilience, pollution, and ocean justice, including in high profile journals and websites such as Science, Nature, The Lancet, The Economist and Scientific American.

“Stacy designed and spearheaded WCS’s regional program in Melanesia, which included formally establishing a new Solomon Islands country program in 2018 while driving major growth in the Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) programs. She brought together a variety of community, investor, and scientific partners to design and create two new large-scale marine protected areas in PNG, which represented the most comprehensive MPA consultations in the country to date and more than tripled the ocean area under protection nationally.

“Beyond the Pacific, Stacy has experience in community development and engagement from Central Africa, where she served as a rural fisheries agent in Gabon and is also part of a number of global marine conservation initiatives transcending her scientific, implementation and rights-based expertise.

“Stacy has dual citizenship of Fiji and the US, and she will continue to be based in Suva, as part of WCS Global’s on-going strategy of having more of our global leadership positions embedded within the countries where we work. The WCS Marine program works in 26 countries, spanning tropical, temperate and subpolar seas, in areas that are biodiverse, functional, resilient, intact, and of high ecological integrity.”

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