Welcoming Elspeth Jones as Nature Guardian
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We are delighted to welcome Elspeth Jones to the NICW team as our first Nature Guardian, a role we are launching as part of a six-month pilot programme to explore how NICW can deepen its relationship with nature, land, and place.
Background
This pilot project has arisen from a series of evidence-gathering exercises we’ve carried out over the last year. Beginning with our work on flooding that emphasised the need for nature to be more tightly integrated into decision-making on flood preparedness, and continuing with our commissioned essays about the benefits of a Nature Guardian and the cultural importance of Nature to Wales.
The pilot is not a settled position for NICW. The Nature Guardian role is a working experiment; a space where we can listen, reflect, adapt, and reimagine how institutions like NICW can be more strongly guided by the natural world. In appointing Elspeth, we are not only inviting her experience and perspective on behalf of Nature, but also embracing a spirit of public inquiry and honest reflection.
A living lab
Over the next six months, we will be learning in public; writing down our thoughts, questions, challenges, and feelings about the Nature Guardian concept as they arise. We hope to share these openly later in the year in the form of a blog or reflective report, in the belief that transparency helps all of us grow. This is part of our commitment to adaptive leadership, and to understanding how roles rooted in care for nature can function within public life.
This approach is highly aligned with our values, particularly being transparent, radical, challenging and practical. Indeed, part of the rationale for a six month pilot is to experience exactly how practical a Nature Guardian will prove to be for us, and to help other organisations understand whether a similar approach might be right for them.
About Elspeth
Elspeth brings a rich and varied background to this unfolding journey. A former barrister turned climate leader, she has dedicated her career to systems-level change, most notably asand also to our Commissioners and the Secretariat to this six-month experiment. Deputy CEO at ClientEarth, and as Executive Director of Size of Wales. She now works at the intersection of law, leadership, and environmental action, offering strategic guidance and coaching through her own impact focused consultancy work.
She is also deeply connected to the land and language of Wales, having been raised in Gwynedd and Ynys Môn, and now living in Bro Morgannwg (the Vale of Glamorgan). A second-language Welsh speaker, Elspeth’s appointment reflects our desire to embed our work not only in policy, but in place and culture.
This pilot asks: What does it mean to listen to nature from within a Board structure? How might we integrate ecological thinking into the way we shape decisions, policies, and partnerships? What becomes possible when a public body creates space for stewardship and reflection, not just strategy?
We don’t have fixed answers yet. That’s the point. But we are ready to use Elspeth’s presence and insight to help us in our journey to better reflecting Nature within our considerations.
We invite you to follow along. We’ll be documenting the journey; not just the outputs, but the process, the doubts, the surprises, and the moments of clarity. In doing so, we hope this work might offer something meaningful not only to NICW, but to others exploring similar questions.
Welcome, Elspeth to NICW. And a warm welcome to all Commissioners and the Secretariat to this six-month experiment.
Image by Ellie Burgin and used under the Pexels licence. Locally based, open source AI was used to help draft this post.
