Terry Townshend is a Beijing-based wildlife conservationist and Fellow of the Paulson Institute.He has lived in Beijing for over 10 years.

Terry runs the Wild Beijing website (www.birdingbeijing.com), celebrating the birds and other wildlife of China's capital city. In 2019 he was invited by the Beijing Municipal government to be a consultant on a project to protect and restore Beijing's biodiversity and, in 2020 he was co-author of a landmark study on how to finance biodiversity conservation: “Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap”, published to inform the UN Convention on Biological Diversity ahead of agreement by more than 190 countries on a new Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022.

In 2021 he was awarded a gold Beijing Citizen Award by 新京报 (Beijing News) for services to the environment, the first foreign recipient in its history.

He is passionate about public engagement on biodiversity and helped set up projects to track two of Beijing's most iconic birds - the Beijing Swift and Beijing Cuckoo - both of which were found to migrate to southern Africa for the northern winter, attracting media coverage including front page of the New York Times. In 2017, in partnership with Chinese NGO Shan Shui Conservation Center, he helped devise and set up a community-based wildlife watching tourism project - “The Valley of the Cats” with yak herders on the Tibetan Plateau, focusing on Snow Leopards. The herders were awarded the first community-based tourism concession for a National Park in China, informing policy development for China's national park system, launched in 2021. The project has raised more than CNY 1.5 million, 100% of which has stayed in the community.

Terry runs the Wild Beijing website (www.birdingbeijing.com), celebrating the birds and other wildlife of China's capital city. In 2019 he was invited by the Beijing Municipal government to be a consultant on a project to protect and restore Beijing's biodiversity and, in 2020 he was co-author of a landmark study on how to finance biodiversity conservation: “Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap”, published to inform the UN Convention on Biological Diversity ahead of agreement by more than 190 countries on a new Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022.

Terry will not charge a fee for this RASBJ birding event but instead would like to invite participants to make a donation - no matter how big or small - to Shan Shui Conservation Center, a local NGO set up by China’s leading conservationist, Professor Lv Zhi from Peking University. ShanShui focuses on community-based conservation on the Tibetan Plateau and runs urban biodiversity programmes in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Please see http://en.shanshui.org/ for more information.