Mrs. Barbara Lausche is an international environmental lawyer with more than 30 years of experience working with governments and organizations worldwide. Her career in environmental law has included managing the World Wildlife Fund-US Legal Technical Assistance Program in the 1980s and then serving at the World Bank as its first full-time environmental lawyer, and in the 1990s as Programme Coordinator at the Global Environmental Facility Secretariat. Since 2011, she has been Director of the Marine Policy Institute (MPI) at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, Sarasota, FL USA, a non-profit marine science research organization which works worldwide with more than 200 staff and some 30 Ph.D. scientists. She is an active member of IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law (WCEL) and World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA) and its Connectivity Conservation Specialist Group.