Fellows Network Quarterly Call: The Emergency Briefing
On 28th April, we held the inaugural Quarterly Call of our Kew Reach Fellows Network, centred on The National Emergency Briefing. The call was timed to coincide with The Emergency Briefing documentary — released on 7th April — and brought together six Associates for a candid, expert-led discussion on nature, biodiversity, and the case for urgent action.
The conversation was chaired by Mark Chadwick and joined by Mike Maunder. Between them, the Associates brought decades of frontline experience across botanic science, ecosystem restoration, geospatial technology, and environmental economics — a reflection of the breadth of thinking we aim to foster through the network.
Associates who joined the discussion:
Richard Barley MBE served as Director of Gardens at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew for 12 years, overseeing the restoration of the Temperate House and the management of one of the world's most complex living plant collections. Before Kew, he directed the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne and led Open Gardens Australia. He was awarded an MBE for services to horticulture in 2023.
Donna Lyndsay is a geospatial strategist with over 35 years in the geospatial, Earth observation and environmental sectors. She was Strategic Market Lead for Environment and Sustainability at Ordnance Survey, where she pioneered the use of satellite and location data for biodiversity monitoring, peatland restoration and supply chain transparency. She is Vice Chair of Space4Climate.
Jonathan Jenkins is the founder and director of the Centre for Ecosystem Restoration Kenya (CER-K), a non-profit restoring degraded ecosystems across Kenya's highlands, savannah, and coast. CER-K operates three restoration hubs, runs an indigenous seed bank, and was the first organisation to achieve BGCI Botanic Garden accreditation in Kenya.
Professor Monique Simmonds OBE spent nearly four decades at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, rising to Deputy Director of Science and heading both the Centre for Economic Botany and Kew's Innovation Unit. Her research spans the commercial and medicinal uses of plants and fungi, and she has provided expert evidence in high-profile criminal investigations. She has been cited over 23,000 times in the scientific literature.
Dr Shahina Ghazanfar is one of the world's foremost authorities on the plants of arid lands, the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. She is the author of the first ever Flora of Oman, co-editor of Flora of Tropical East Africa, and author and editor of Flora of Iraq. She was awarded a Doctor of Science by Cambridge and received the Linnean Society's Medal for Botany.
Dr Steph Hime is the founder and Managing Director of Little Blue Research, a consultancy specialising in environmental economics and natural capital valuation. She was Technical Director of the Natural Capital Coalition and led the development of the Natural Capital Protocol. She is project lead for ISO 14054, the international standard on natural capital accounting for organisations.
This is the first of four Quarterly Calls planned for 2026, with the next session taking place in July. As the network grows, so too does the depth of conversation — and we intend to keep building on it.
If you would like to join the Kew Reach Fellows Network as an Associate, we'd love to hear from you — visit our Careers page to get in touch.
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