Dr Steve Boyes is a conservationist, National Geographic Explorer, and TED Senior Fellow who has dedicated his career to safeguarding Africa’s wilderness areas and the species that depend on them. A native of South Africa, he founded the Cape Parrot Project in 2010 with support from the National Geographic Society and is the Founder and Chairman of the Wild Bird Trust.
Boyes and his research team focus on establishing robust early-21st-century hydrological and ecological baselines to support evidence-based conservation and help governments build long-term resilience to the impacts of climate change.
In 2015, he launched the Okavango Wilderness Project, a multi-year initiative to explore and protect the little-known wilderness of the Angolan highlands, which supplies more than 95 percent of the water sustaining the Okavango Delta and the biodiversity of the greater Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area. Central to this effort is the protection of the “Angolan Water Tower,” first described by his team and now recognised as the primary water source for the world’s largest transboundary conservation area and approximately two-thirds of Africa’s remaining elephants. The initiative has since evolved into the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project. Through this work, Boyes and his team mapped the vast inland delta formed by the Okavango River and its tributaries in unprecedented detail, leading to Boyes and the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project being named Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year.
In 2022, Boyes launched an even more ambitious initiative: The Great Spine of Africa expeditions, a multi-year, multidisciplinary effort in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. This work aims to transform understanding of Africa’s major water basins, which collectively sustain hundreds of millions of people and some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth.
Boyes holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Development (Protected Area Management) from the University of Natal, South Africa, and a PhD in Zoology. He is a Research Associate at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town.
