Dr. Phoebe Barnard: Change through Leadership


Alumna Phoebe Barnard stands as a staunch champion of African biodiversity, global conservation

Scientist Dr. Phoebe Barnard (’83) has done a lot to change and improve the world since her days as a biology student at Acadia.

Throughout a 30-year career, Barnard has tried to find answers to the following questions: How can we help species and ecosystems get through the gauntlet of the next 200 years of tough environmental change? How can we achieve tipping points to a more sustainable and just society?

Barnard came to Acadia after she and her sister took a road trip from their hometown in Massachusetts in a little car packed full with a guitar, sleeping bags, rucksacks and a picnic basket.

“We went looking in Nova Scotia and fell in love with Wolfville and Acadia,” Barnard says. “They were absolutely full of magic, especially in autumn colours.”

After earning a BSc (Hons) in biology with a focus on the behavioural and evolutionary ecology of birds, Barnard followed her passion and completed a Master’s in zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1990. Not wanting to live under the apartheid system, Barnard and her family moved to Namibia, where she taught evolution, ecology, and behaviour at the University of Namibia.

From there she started work on her PhD at Uppsala University in Sweden, received a Fulbright Fellowship and moved there for a year to finish her thesis. Since then, Barnard has had a varied career, primarily in Africa, focusing on biodiversity and climate change. In 2002, she received a Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.

“This was the same year Sir David Attenborough (hero to virtually all environmentalists) and Professor Georgina Mace (who reformed the way we prioritize endangered species in different categories) received the same award,” Barnard says.  “That was a treat.”

Poise and sense of purpose

Former Vice-President Academic and retired Acadia University professor Dr. Tom Herman, one of Barnard’s teachers at Acadia, was not surprised by her success.

“When Phoebe arrived at Acadia as a young undergraduate, I was immediately struck by her poise and sense of purpose,” Herman says. “She was clearly committed to making a difference, and it was obvious that she would deliver.”

Herman said that when Barnard went to Africa, she entered a world with the greatest conservation challenges on the planet. “She has emerged as a champion for African biodiversity, a leader in conservation biology, and a mentor and role model for young women and men in the field. She has done Acadia proud!”

Currently living in South Africa, Barnard has three jobs.  She is lead scientist for climate change bioadaptation at the South African National Biodiversity Institute, focusing on the vulnerability and adaptation of species and ecosystems in southern Africa to climate change, land use change, invasive species and other related environmental pressures. She is also head of a new program she initiated on biodiversity futures in South Africa.

Barnard’s third job is to run a detailed research program (with postdocs, PhD and Master’s students) on endemic birds of the fynbos biome, one of the world’s richest and most beautiful biodiversity hotspots in the Cape Floristic region.  

She is also an associate researcher with the University of Cape Town’s Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, which is a national centre of excellence; the African Climate and Development Initiative; and with the University of Stellenbosch’s Business School, through its Institute for Futures Research.

A career highlight for the coming year is her participation in a women’s leadership expedition to Antarctica. “I’m absolutely thrilled to be joining a worldwide select group of 77 women leaders in global change science,” Barnard says. “Improving women’s leadership skills and clarity is surely a powerful way to help change society for the better.

“Science is a crucial part of the way the world works, but only a tiny part of the solution to our sustainability crisis,” she says.

She believes more important factors are emotion, perception, want, need, politics, and especially the economy, all of which undermine scientists’ best efforts. Barnard says we can’t solve our sustainability crisis with more facts. We need to change behaviours and the economy.   

“Don’t underestimate your arts electives,” she adds. “They are the key to the solution!”

By Laura Churchill Duke (’98)

Originally published in the Bulletin, Fall 2016.


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