Elisabeth Fahrni Mansur

Adjunct Research Fellow

Lehrerseminar Kreuzlingen | Switzerland 

Elisabeth Fahrni Mansur completed her professional training as a teacher in Switzerland, where she greatly enjoyed working as a class teacher, school board member, and teacher’s trainer in the public school system. In 2002 she moved to Bangladesh and began working as a nature guide and manager of boat tours to the Sundarban mangrove forest with her husband Rubaiyat Mansur Mowgli.

While engaged as CEO for her father-in-law’s nature tourism business, Elisabeth initiated an educational outreach program for the Bangladesh Cetacean Diversity Project, a project which she co-founded with her husband and their mentor Brian D. Smith. Their impactful research, outreach, capacity building and policy development efforts became the Bangladesh country program for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The interactive exhibitions developed by Elisabeth reached hundreds of thousand visitors across the coastal region in Bangladesh. The measurable improvements in local knowledge and attitudes towards marine wildlife and regulations to reduce their extinction risks are widely regarded as among the most effective conservation initiatives to date in Bangladesh.

With a steadily growing local team, Elisabeth enabled the declaration of marine protected areas, the establishment of citizen science monitoring networks, and the improvement of processes and policies for wildlife protection and protected area management in Bangladesh. Since resigning from WCS in 2024, she continues her collaborative engagements with government agencies, students, and marine conservation professionals in Bangladesh and across the Indian Ocean as an independent consultant.

Elisabeth excels at translating scientific findings into national and institutional policies for improving marine conservation and sustainable fisheries management. She is passionate about co-developing strategic, multidisciplinary and interactive processes and tools that are particularly effective in strengthening collaborations across departments, agencies and ministries, catalysed by multilateral international conventions. Elisabeth is a Kinship Conservation Fellow trained in market-based tools for conservation and leadership, and Vice-Chair for the Indian Ocean Region of the IUCN SSC Shark Specialist Group.