Kumar Paudel is a conservation scholar-practitioner from Nepal with an MPhil in Conservation Leadership from the University of Cambridge. He is the Founder and Director of Greenhood Nepal, a science-driven conservation nonprofit working on the protection of Nepal’s threatened but neglected wildlife species. His work primarily involves interdisciplinary conservation covering law enforcement, wildlife trade, community conservation, and policy. He also utilizes creative mediums like folk songs and children’s storybooks to simplify conservation science for the public. He has successfully filed and won a landmark wildlife conservation petition in Nepal’s highest court and continues to pursue research-based court actions to inform laws and policies.
Growing up with the timid creatures on his millet farm in remote Nepal, Paudel developed an early fascination with pangolins. Seeing them brutally poached for meat and trade along the Nepal-China border compelled him to pursue a career in wildlife conservation and curbing illegal wildlife trade. He initiated the Pangolin Roundtable in 2015 to scale up pangolin conservation efforts in Nepal by gathering diverse stakeholders from the government and civil society to discuss challenges and solutions. It has since become the annual flagship program for World Pangolin Day in Nepal. In an effort to curb rampant poaching, he undertook novel research to understand motivations for poaching by interviewing wildlife prisoners across the country, which has greatly informed his impactful conservation awareness and community engagement programs. He is currently leading several research and conservation projects on pangolin conservation in Nepal and South Asia.
He was a Biodiversity Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Research Affiliate at Lancaster University. Currently, he is Co-Chair for South Asia for the IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group and a National Geographic Explorer investigating strategies to safeguard pangolin habitats. He was also recognized as a Pangolin Champion in 2021, awarded by Save Pangolins.