ARTIFICIAL intelligence, limiting the scale of projects and Gerald Durrell’s 100th anniversary are some of the key items on Durrell’s 2025 agenda, as the organisation looks to move on from a year of turmoil.
Matthew Hatchwell, chair of the organisation’s board of trustees – who was re-elected for a second term last month – looked to shift the conversation to the future after a year that saw members and former staff speak out against the trust.
December’s AGM saw more than 1,000 people vote in an election that could have overturned Durrell’s leadership but, despite efforts by rebel members to put forward a full slate of candidates, the organisation’s own picks took every available seat on the charity’s trustee board.
Mr Hatchwell said he felt “relief” after the difficulties of the past year, which saw rebel members in a group called We Love The Zoo spent time in arbitration with Durrell before trying to oust the charity’s trustees in an extraordinary general meeting in May.
“It’s been a stressful few months and that doesn’t all lift immediately,” he added.
“There’s always room for discussion”
Speaking to the JEP, Mr Hatchwell said the board was “always open to constructive criticism and we can always improve what we’re doing”.
He added: “But we feel as though, as a board, we’ve engaged with this group of critics as actively and constructively as we possibly can now, for 18 months, and we’ve been very patient in responding to their concerns.
“But we went through the extraordinary general meeting, we’ve just been through the AGM where there was a motion brought by that group of members and we just feel that the time has come for us to focus on the future.
“Therefore, all of the work on the new strategy is where our energies need to be focused, and we very much hope that all members will join us on that journey.”
He added: “We absolutely hope that everyone will do so. We don’t want to lose members. We want more people to join Durrell and so we urge all our members to work with us and continue on this journey together.
“There’s always room for discussion. There’s always room for healthy disagreement but let’s keep the focus on the future.”
“Rewild Our World” up for review
The Rewild Our World strategy, launched in 2018, is up for a review this year in timing that Mr Hatchwell called “serendipitous”.
The review would include questions about the scale and role of Durrell, particularly in international rewilding projects.
“I think the question of scale is going to be an important one,” explained Mr Hatchwell.
“Durrell has got a very particular institutional focus on species conservation and I think there are probably limits on how much you can expand that with an individual site and without losing what it is that makes Durrell so special.
“Therefore, I think one of the key conversations that we’ll need to have is how big we want to get.”
He explained: “The bigger you get, the more you get drawn into areas of conservation, for example around law enforcement, that aren’t massive priorities for Durrell sites where we work because of the institutional expertise here around species conservation.
“Up to now, we haven’t taken a lot of direct legal responsibility for that. If we were to do that in future, I think we would need to make a very deliberate decision that that’s something that we want to do.”
Law enforcement, he said, included managing or marking borders to sites, for example in Madagascar, where park boundaries are not typically marked.
Durrell’s 100-year lease on land in the Scottish Highlands was “enormously significant” in a field where five-year grants were common, he added.
Carbon offsetting for future AI use?
Durrell has grown “enormously” in the past seven or eight years, Mr Hatchwell said, and that growth should continue but not necessarily through measures like a bigger board of trustees.
AI tools could become more important, he explained.
“We’re also going to have to be smart about working as efficiently as we can,” he said.
“Just one of the examples that we were talking about was integrating AI tools as much as we can into increasing the efficiency of how we run our programmes.
“We’re going to be looking at a very different organisation, I suspect, in ten years time.
AI will affect an awful lot of how we all work, I suspect, over the next decade.
“We need to make sure that those conversations, those processes, are taking place within Durrell as well.”
Asked about the environmental impact of AI – with the UN Environmental Programme warning that AI could use more water than half of the UK’s annual consumption in 2027 – Mr Hatchwell said the answer “has to do with carbonfootprint overall”, citing Durrell’s carbon-offsetting project, Rewild Carbon, in Brazil.
An upcoming year of celebrations
This year will mark the 100th anniversary of Gerald Durrell’s birth, and a series of events, starting this month, are in the charity’s calendar to commemorate this. These include a plaque unveiling and trails at Jersey Zoo, as well as a trek to Gerald Durrell’s birthplace in India.
