Dr Barry Traill AM
Dr Barry Traill AM is one of Australia’s most successful environmental campaigners and conservation advocates. He has initiated, led and co-led many successful campaigns and programs to protect nature and climate over more than 40 years.
Dr Traill grew up in country Victoria and developed a deep and early love of Australian wildlife and the natural world. He did both his undergraduate and post-graduate studies at Monash University, completing a Doctor of Philosophy in the ecology of wildlife communities in Ironbark forests in northern Victoria in 1996.
Since his teenage years he has actively worked as an advocate of conservation. He combined his doctoral studies with advocacy to successfully get the biologically rich Ironbark forests of his study areas protected in new national parks.
Since then he has worked with a range of conservation and climate advocacy organisations, first in Victoria, then nationally. One of his major earlier national policy wins was leading the campaign for legislation in 2004 to curb large scale tree clearing on private lands in Queensland — policies that protected millions of hectares of bushland and significantly reduced Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution.
In 2002, together with environmental author Mr Tim Low AM, Dr Traill co-founded the Invasive Species Council, a new advocacy body focused on analysis and collaborative biosecurity policy to tackle one of the greatest threats to nature in Australia - incoming foreign feral animals and weeds.
In 2007, he joined the global non-governmental organisation, Pew Charitable Trusts, to establish and lead their Australian conservation program, which works on landscape scale conservation of Outback lands and seas. The collaborative projects of this work included supporting the establishment of over 60 million hectares of Indigenous Protected Areas, advocacy to successive governments which ensured the establishment of thousands of long-term Indigenous Ranger positions, and the creation of the world’s largest marine park network. This included the establishment of the Great Kimberley Marine Park, protecting nearly the entire coastline of one of the world’s great natural places.
Dr Traill now works with Climate Action Network to get much stronger bi-partisan support in federal politics for decisive policies on climate change. He set up and led work which co-ordinated and supported much of the on-ground work which made the 2022 federal election the ‘Climate Election’. He continues to work on a range of wildlife conservation projects.
In recognition of his significant service to conservation and the environment, Dr Traill was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours. Dr Traill now lives in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland on a wildlife rich property with his partner, fellow conservationist and zoologist Susie Duncan.