Dr. Alex Dehgan Joins Renaissance Philanthropy to Address Fire in the Amazon
Pioneering conservationist and founder of Conservation X Labs will design bold solutions to combat fire across the Amazon.
Renaissance Philanthropy is pleased to announce that Dr. Alex Dehgan is joining Renaissance Philanthropy as a Fellow. As part of his fellowship, Dr. Dehgan will be working on scoping a multi-donor philanthropic fund with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for addressing fire in South America, with a focus on the Amazon.
Fire is a major threat to the Amazon forests, and other important habitats, and creating new approaches and innovations to address it will be critical to the region’s long-term future.
In the initial design phase, the fund will explore high-leverage strategies—from conservation technology to policy design to local capacity-building—to prevent and mitigate wildfires across these ecologically critical regions. By combining emerging science and tech tools with place-based knowledge and systems-level thinking, the fund will aim to support scalable interventions that protect biodiversity, strengthen resilience, and reduce emissions at a continental scale.
Dr. Dehgan also serves as the CEO of Conservation X Labs, which harnesses innovation and invests frontier technologies to prevent the 6th Mass Extinction and helped found the field of conservation technology. Conservation X Labs has helped build the field of Naturetech, supporting over 164 breakthroughs on six continents, which have gone on to raise $550 million. He is a Professor of the Practice of Sustainability and Global Futures Fellow at Arizona State University, where he helped design the new forthcoming College of Conservation Futures.
Dr. Dehgan previously served as the Chief Scientist of USAID, with rank of Assistant Administrator, and created the Agency’s “DARPA for Development”, and designed and launched the US Government’s Grand Challenge for Development program, and helped program hundreds of millions of dollars for science and innovation. He also worked in multiple positions in the Office of the Secretary at the State Department, including on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria-Lebanon, and the broader Islamic world, focused on advancing science for diplomacy, planetary health, and national security. Alex was also the founding country director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afghanistan Program and helped create Afghanistan’s first national park. Dr. Dehgan is the author of the book, The Snow Leopard Project, which describes the effort, which won the Gold 2020 Nautilus Book Prize.
