Remi Chandran

Dr. Remi Chandran (PhD) is an environmental policy scientist and science-policy negotiator, working in the domain of implementation of environmemtal and geospatial technologies in emerging economies. His two main areas of focus are on Geospatial Digital Public Infrastructures and Waste to Energy technologies -supporting governments in the implementation of technology projects to address human-nature conflicts and address waste management problems.

His notable work has been the development of the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) initiative - a project which he developed while working with the United Nations University (UNU), Tokyo in 2005. His idea of building a common information sharing framework (bridging policy makers, enforcement officials, researchers and civil society members) to monitor illegal wildlife crime questioned the practice of enforcement information sharing which relied on closed information where participation of scientific experts were discouraged. The first prototype of WEMS was developed in partnership with Asian Conservation Alliance, a network of grass root civil society members from 14 Asian Countries. In 2007, he moved to United Nations University – International Institute for Software Technology based in Macao as a Senior Researcher where he re-constituted the project to the needs of government agencies. The success of WEMS however had to wait until 2011 when Lusaka Agreement finally approved the implementation of Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System in East Africa.

Dr. Chandran left UN in 2010 but leads the WEMS initiative and continues to serve in its management committee. He is currently leading the development of the Digital Public Infrastructure Project (DPI)[1] for addressing Human-Nature conflicts in Africa.

In a journal article, he explains the limitation of science and scientists in addressing the gaps in information sharing, where he outlines the role of policy beliefs as a key factor in the acceptance and rejection of a transboundary enforcement monitoring systems.

Dr.Chandran completed his Masters from University College Dublin, Ireland and PhD from the Faculty of Geoinformation and Earth Observation (ITC),University of Twente , Netherlands. He is a recipient of the Irish government fellowship (1995) the Erasmus Mundus (2010) fellowship and the UNU-IAS PhD Fellowship (2012–2014).

References

1. Chandran, Remi, Robert Hoppe, W.T. De Vries, & Yola Georgiadou (in press). Conflicting policy beliefs and informational complexities in designing a transboundary enforcement monitoring system. Journal of Cleaner Production
2. Chandran, R., Krishnan, P., & Nguyen, K. (2011). Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS): A solution to support compliance of Multilateral Environmental Agreements. Government Information Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages 231–238. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2010.09.002
3. African Wildlife Monitored and Protected
4. Boosting CITES -Jacob Phelps, Edward L. Webb, David Bickford, Vincent Nijman and Navjot S. Sodhi (2010), Science Journal
5. New UN database to help combat wildlife crime – 4 June 2007, Reuters.
6. UN University launches system to combat illegal wildlife trade – 28 September 2006, Japan Times (Kyodo News)
7. 国際連合大学が野生動物の違法取引監視システムをESRI社のGISを用いて構築
8. Will regional monitoring systems help in environmental governance? A case study on the WEMS model for monitoring enforcement of CITES Convention.