About
Dr. Tim Wittig is a conservationist and applied scientist with a professional background in intelligence, risk, R&D, data architectures, and targeting illicit networks.
Tim currently hold fellowships at Oxford University (Oxford Martin School) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.
From 2016 to 2023, Tim served as head of intelligence and analysis for the United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces, a program of the Royal Foundation that uses high-level commitments combined with actionable intelligence to mobilize the worlds’ shipping, transport, and financial industries to help defeat global wildlife trafficking.
Since their inception in 2016, Tim has played a central role in the United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces, a groundbreaking program of the Royal Foundation of the Prince and Princess of Wales to use data and intelligence, alongside high-level formal commitments, to mobilize 200+ of the worlds’ largest banks, maritime shipping companies, and airlines to take meaningful action against global wildlife trafficking. Tim conceived of and currently runs the central intelligence sharing system of the both Taskforces.
Prior to this, Tim’s career spanned both research and practice. Tim began his career in national security, and was one of the first people in the US Intelligence Community (IC) to treat biodiversity and ecosystem collapse as a threat to global security. He was one of the authors of the 2013 US National Intelligence Assessment on Wildlife Trafficking and has contributed to various national strategies and major wildlife crime legislation in his career. Tim’s first full-time job in conservation was in 2014 when, based in Africa, he headed up counter wildlife trafficking initiatives for the Wildlife Conservation Society.
As an expert practitioner, Tim has worked extensively with leaders of global companies and major public sector and civil society organizations to create cost-effective knowledge-driven solutions to complex challenges, in particular relating to:
Information and data environments
Environmental sustainability and wildlife conservation.
Risks to global supply and value chains, especially those driven by criminal, social, and geopolitical factors.
Compliance and due diligence in complex, multi-jurisdictional contexts.
As an academic and researcher, Tim was a tenured professor of Globalization and Humanitarian Action at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands until 2019 when he left academia to go back into the world of practice. Prior to that, he held research and academic faculty appointments at the Johns Hopkins University (Applied Physics Laboratory), US National Defense University, the University of Amsterdam, the University of St Andrews, and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Tim’s academic research focuses on the use of finance to impact political and social outcomes - and in particular the role data, intelligence, and information plays in this process - with applications in wildlife conservation, ESG/sustainable investing, terrorist finance, conflict economics, economic warfare, and asymmetric information/influence operations.
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