In 2011, he was an assistant professor at Swiss public university ETH Zurich when a thought-provoking chat with a visiting friend, primate biologist Serge Wich, led them to a conservation breakthrough.

Then, Prof Koh was studying the environmental impact of oil palm tree cultivation in Southeast Asia, and Prof Wich shared that deforestation due to such expansion was hurting orang utans in Indonesia. 

“Later, when we were talking about my new hobby of flying remote-controlled toy planes, it hit us: Why not attach a digital camera to a toy plane to map and monitor deforestation?” explains Prof Koh. 

Their prototype drone is much cheaper than commercially-available ones. 

During a four-day field test in Indonesia in early 2012, it completed over 30 missions and collected thousands of high-quality aerial photographs and video clips of forests and wildlife. 

Prof Koh says: “That was probably the first time that an amateur drone was used in conservation research in tropical rainforests.”

The two scientists published their work online, coining the term “conservation drone”. After an overwhelming response from colleagues and the media, they co-founded the non-profit group ConservationDrones.org to show others how to build and deploy the technology, with Prof Koh taking a sabbatical from academic work from 2012 to 2014 to focus on the organisation.

While he returned to academia at the University of Adelaide in Australia, his foray into non-profit work stayed with him. 

After several years, he wondered if he could be more than a professor. He had partnered Conservation International (CI) several times by then, including to study how nature benefits society in Southeast Asia, and an opportunity at the non-profit presented itself. 

He says: “After some discussions, I left my tenured position to be CI’s vice president of science partnerships and innovation.

“It was a big change in my job scope, but I thought it was an important leap to make. I wanted to understand how a large non-government organisation works and partners with academia and the public and private sectors. Everything I learned, from research and my experiences in ConservationDrones.org and CI, I brought to the CNCS.”

Making the case for nature

In just a few years, the CNCS has published on investing in nature-based climate solutions in Southeast Asia; on Asean’s challenges and opportunities in implementing such solutions, and many other scientific papers and research briefs.