Jessica Maria Grayham
Many thanks for sending these questions. I enjoyed answering them and may have been long winded in some of my responses. Please let me know if you need anything further! When can I expect it to be published so I can amplify further among my network?
1. A little bit of everywhere. My mother is Colombian (you would never tell except for my struggle with idioms) :) and my father's roots stem from Europe. I'm originally from the Midwest--Ohio. Grew up and went to college in FL and then moved to the West Coast--in Southern CA. I have lived overseas in Europe and East Asia on several occasions for both work and studies.
2. I was grateful to attend a good sports team college--University of Florida where we won multiple basketball and football national championships! I received my Bachelor's degree through an academic scholarship from UF as I came from a minority, single family home. I studied Chinese and International Affairs after leaving their business school program mid-way through my 4 years. I received my Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego studying International Politics, Environmental Policy with a regional focus in China. I also studied Mandarin Chinese at Peking University in Beijing, China through Columbia University's Intensive Summer Language Program. I'm also a certified instructor where I received my training when I worked at INTERPOL.
3. I worked for many years in large, bureaucratic and at times dysfunctional organizations. I learned so much from those experiences and loved working across sectors and on cross-cutting issues, and pushed the envelope on what was possible in every role. I had the luxury of always being surrounded by visionary leaders in each of their respective fields, some who served as important mentors to me that paved my career. Given my field in law enforcement and conservation, I had the opportunity to be surrounded by many smart, innovative, passionate, and successful entrepreneurs who do amazing work changing the world for a better place. That was inspiring enough for me and so my decision to launch my company upon my return from living and working in France was the obvious next step for me.
4. JG Global Advisory is a minority, woman-owned, small business based in Washington, DC and was established in September 2018. We work at the cross-section of law enforcement and conservation, responding to the challenges of environmental security by providing integrated solutions for a secure world. We support executives largely from international non-profit organizations on strategic policy and planning, partnership facilitation, and project management on various environmental and security issues (e.g. wildlife trafficking, climate change, financial crimes, etc.).
5. Being concerned about the environment is not only for tree huggers. Protecting biodiversity and natural resources is a public health issue, a conservation issue, an economic issue, and a national security issue. It affects every person from every corner of the globe from the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breath, and the ecosystems we live in. Environmental crimes are one of the top five most lucrative transnational organized crimes around the world, only behind human trafficking, drug trafficking and counterfeits, estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Many environmental crimes, such as wildlife and forest crimes are a low risk of detection and high reward potential, so naturally, criminals are drawn to them and even in limited circumstances, terrorist organizations are known to have engaged in wildlife trafficking.
6. We must change our conservation strategy and reduce the human footprint of harm to the environment b/c we will otherwise face the 6th mass extinction (which is already underway according to some scientists). Billions of wildlife populations have been annihilated in recent decades. We're already seeing growing evidence of keystone species whose populations are in rapid decline, such as insects and bees. The recently popular docuseries on Netflix, "Tiger King" highlights many travesties and reflects examples of criminals masked/disguised as wildlife conservationists, but something that was most striking to public audiences is that there are more tigers privately owned in the state of Texas than there are tigers out in the wild globally.
As another example of the 6th mass extinction underway, at the current rate of poaching for elephants, we may not see an elephant in the wild in the next decade. Elephants are my spirit animal if I ever were to have one. If you haven't learned about elephants, I implore your readers to learn b/c they are fascinating creatures.
We can't arrest our way through this problem, we have to target the entire supply chain from: source, transit, and demand. These are real issues and they affect us all here at home. The U.S. is a major demand market for both legal and illegal wildlife trade, mostly exotic birds and reptiles for the pet and accessories trade, respectively. Finally, we need multi-stakeholders, public-private partnerships, and a holistic approach through additional resources. The conservation community is currently under threat as it's a very crowded space with few players often competing in a small pool with limited resources, yet applying the same, old solutions to an ever changing problem. We have to change this as an international community.
7 and 8. We are all feeling the impact of the COVID-19 right now and while we may be home alone or perhaps with our immediate family members, but we are also more connected than we have ever been before--for the good, bad, and ugly. As the death toll in the U.S. surpasses 50,000 due to COVID-19, many of us now know someone who has been infected and maybe even someone who did not recover from it. The Wuhan wildlife market in China is thought to be the place of origin for where the Corona virus was developed last December and transferred (as a zoonotic disease) from a wild animal to a person; some think it was a bat perhaps transferred to a pangolin (world's most trafficked species) to a human. Whatever it was, we may never fully know as the evidence of the wildlife markets have been "cleaned up". If you've ever had the opportunity to visit China or SE Asia as I have, you have undoubtedly crossed paths with one of their wet markets, which sells all sorts of items in an open air market. In addition to these popular markets for households to purchase food, produce, and other household items, there are also wildlife markets (not synonymous), that are often filled with endangered species, their parts and products, which have been illegally traded and sold in the open among consumers and citizens of those neighborhoods. Many previous global pandemics, such as SARS, Ebola, AIDS, Avian Influenza, and others have all stemmed from zoonotic disease transfers from wild animals to humans. Many of my clients from conservation organizations have applied pressure on governments due to the COVID outbreak to ban the illegal wildlife trade not only as a stopgap measure, but also as a long term solution to reduce the public health pandemic and address one of the major drivers of species extinction. In response, both of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments have since stepped up due to the pandemic and the tanking of the global economy to place a near total ban on the consumption and trade of wild animals. There are still some important loopholes that need to be addressed in these near total bans, otherwise it will not fully and effectively resolve the issue, such as the loophole which makes some wildlife legal to consume for medicinal purposes. This must be addressed and enforcement must be implemented once these near bans go into place.
9. I continue to live by my motto: do what you love and love what you do. I will always work in the field of sustainability and conservation. I'm currently authoring several critical pieces as a thought leader in my field exploring the role of corruption involved in wildlife trafficking and the use of all-female anti-poaching units as a solution. I will continue to scale up JG Global Advisory in the short and medium term. In the midst of the pandemic, we've been very lucky and blessed to be growing our staffing and have accepted new clients. We continue to expand our suite of tools and management consulting services to companies, governments, and international organizations and are currently working on developing financial models for companies to incorporate in their sustainability planning.
Thanks again for the opportunity!
Best,
Jessica
On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 6:37 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
1. Where are you from?
2. What schools have you attended and degrees earned?
3. At what time did you develop an interest in starting your own company?
4. When did you establish JG Global Advisory and what is it's mission?
5. Why is it important for everyone to be concerned about the environment?
6. Please share a few concerns regarding issues with endangered wildlife around the world and the status of finding working solutions.
7. What are your current views on Wildlife Markets in China and their connection to the COVID-19 virus?
8. What will the future look like for Wildlife Markets and how they will be operated in the future to avoid a recurrence of a deadly virus?
9. What does the future hold for Jessica Graham and the JG Global Advisory?
Show original message
1. A little bit of everywhere. My mother is Colombian (you would never tell except for my struggle with idioms) :) and my father's roots stem from Europe. I'm originally from the Midwest--Ohio. Grew up and went to college in FL and then moved to the West Coast--in Southern CA. I have lived overseas in Europe and East Asia on several occasions for both work and studies.
2. I was grateful to attend a good sports team college--University of Florida where we won multiple basketball and football national championships! I received my Bachelor's degree through an academic scholarship from UF as I came from a minority, single family home. I studied Chinese and International Affairs after leaving their business school program mid-way through my 4 years. I received my Master's degree from the University of California, San Diego studying International Politics, Environmental Policy with a regional focus in China. I also studied Mandarin Chinese at Peking University in Beijing, China through Columbia University's Intensive Summer Language Program. I'm also a certified instructor where I received my training when I worked at INTERPOL.
3. I worked for many years in large, bureaucratic and at times dysfunctional organizations. I learned so much from those experiences and loved working across sectors and on cross-cutting issues, and pushed the envelope on what was possible in every role. I had the luxury of always being surrounded by visionary leaders in each of their respective fields, some who served as important mentors to me that paved my career. Given my field in law enforcement and conservation, I had the opportunity to be surrounded by many smart, innovative, passionate, and successful entrepreneurs who do amazing work changing the world for a better place. That was inspiring enough for me and so my decision to launch my company upon my return from living and working in France was the obvious next step for me.
4. JG Global Advisory is a minority, woman-owned, small business based in Washington, DC and was established in September 2018. We work at the cross-section of law enforcement and conservation, responding to the challenges of environmental security by providing integrated solutions for a secure world. We support executives largely from international non-profit organizations on strategic policy and planning, partnership facilitation, and project management on various environmental and security issues (e.g. wildlife trafficking, climate change, financial crimes, etc.).
5. Being concerned about the environment is not only for tree huggers. Protecting biodiversity and natural resources is a public health issue, a conservation issue, an economic issue, and a national security issue. It affects every person from every corner of the globe from the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breath, and the ecosystems we live in. Environmental crimes are one of the top five most lucrative transnational organized crimes around the world, only behind human trafficking, drug trafficking and counterfeits, estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Many environmental crimes, such as wildlife and forest crimes are a low risk of detection and high reward potential, so naturally, criminals are drawn to them and even in limited circumstances, terrorist organizations are known to have engaged in wildlife trafficking.
6. We must change our conservation strategy and reduce the human footprint of harm to the environment b/c we will otherwise face the 6th mass extinction (which is already underway according to some scientists). Billions of wildlife populations have been annihilated in recent decades. We're already seeing growing evidence of keystone species whose populations are in rapid decline, such as insects and bees. The recently popular docuseries on Netflix, "Tiger King" highlights many travesties and reflects examples of criminals masked/disguised as wildlife conservationists, but something that was most striking to public audiences is that there are more tigers privately owned in the state of Texas than there are tigers out in the wild globally.
As another example of the 6th mass extinction underway, at the current rate of poaching for elephants, we may not see an elephant in the wild in the next decade. Elephants are my spirit animal if I ever were to have one. If you haven't learned about elephants, I implore your readers to learn b/c they are fascinating creatures.
We can't arrest our way through this problem, we have to target the entire supply chain from: source, transit, and demand. These are real issues and they affect us all here at home. The U.S. is a major demand market for both legal and illegal wildlife trade, mostly exotic birds and reptiles for the pet and accessories trade, respectively. Finally, we need multi-stakeholders, public-private partnerships, and a holistic approach through additional resources. The conservation community is currently under threat as it's a very crowded space with few players often competing in a small pool with limited resources, yet applying the same, old solutions to an ever changing problem. We have to change this as an international community.
7 and 8. We are all feeling the impact of the COVID-19 right now and while we may be home alone or perhaps with our immediate family members, but we are also more connected than we have ever been before--for the good, bad, and ugly. As the death toll in the U.S. surpasses 50,000 due to COVID-19, many of us now know someone who has been infected and maybe even someone who did not recover from it. The Wuhan wildlife market in China is thought to be the place of origin for where the Corona virus was developed last December and transferred (as a zoonotic disease) from a wild animal to a person; some think it was a bat perhaps transferred to a pangolin (world's most trafficked species) to a human. Whatever it was, we may never fully know as the evidence of the wildlife markets have been "cleaned up". If you've ever had the opportunity to visit China or SE Asia as I have, you have undoubtedly crossed paths with one of their wet markets, which sells all sorts of items in an open air market. In addition to these popular markets for households to purchase food, produce, and other household items, there are also wildlife markets (not synonymous), that are often filled with endangered species, their parts and products, which have been illegally traded and sold in the open among consumers and citizens of those neighborhoods. Many previous global pandemics, such as SARS, Ebola, AIDS, Avian Influenza, and others have all stemmed from zoonotic disease transfers from wild animals to humans. Many of my clients from conservation organizations have applied pressure on governments due to the COVID outbreak to ban the illegal wildlife trade not only as a stopgap measure, but also as a long term solution to reduce the public health pandemic and address one of the major drivers of species extinction. In response, both of the Chinese and Vietnamese governments have since stepped up due to the pandemic and the tanking of the global economy to place a near total ban on the consumption and trade of wild animals. There are still some important loopholes that need to be addressed in these near total bans, otherwise it will not fully and effectively resolve the issue, such as the loophole which makes some wildlife legal to consume for medicinal purposes. This must be addressed and enforcement must be implemented once these near bans go into place.
9. I continue to live by my motto: do what you love and love what you do. I will always work in the field of sustainability and conservation. I'm currently authoring several critical pieces as a thought leader in my field exploring the role of corruption involved in wildlife trafficking and the use of all-female anti-poaching units as a solution. I will continue to scale up JG Global Advisory in the short and medium term. In the midst of the pandemic, we've been very lucky and blessed to be growing our staffing and have accepted new clients. We continue to expand our suite of tools and management consulting services to companies, governments, and international organizations and are currently working on developing financial models for companies to incorporate in their sustainability planning.
Thanks again for the opportunity!
Best,
Jessica
On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 6:37 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
1. Where are you from?
2. What schools have you attended and degrees earned?
3. At what time did you develop an interest in starting your own company?
4. When did you establish JG Global Advisory and what is it's mission?
5. Why is it important for everyone to be concerned about the environment?
6. Please share a few concerns regarding issues with endangered wildlife around the world and the status of finding working solutions.
7. What are your current views on Wildlife Markets in China and their connection to the COVID-19 virus?
8. What will the future look like for Wildlife Markets and how they will be operated in the future to avoid a recurrence of a deadly virus?
9. What does the future hold for Jessica Graham and the JG Global Advisory?
Show original message