Biography|Kirsten Schuijt — The Gland Secretariat That Hired Her as an Economist at Twenty-Five

People treat her WWF years as a Dutch story that starts in Zeist in 2016.

The first paid desk was here, in the Gland secretariat, when she was twenty-five.

Geneva Solutions puts that posting around 1999: a natural-resource economist inside the World Wide Fund for Nature's international headquarters.

WWF had been on this Gland parcel since 1979, in buildings between Avenue du Mont-Blanc and Rue Mauverney, a short walk from the lake.

The job matched the field years that preceded it.

She had already spent time in Kenyan and Malawian wetlands measuring what those marshes were worth to the people who lived on them.

At Gland the same question went global.

In 2004 she and Luke Brander published Living Waters, a WWF paper that tried to put a number on wetland goods and services worldwide.

The following April, Ecological Economics carried her article on what African communities lose when those systems are drained or cut apart.

The campus in front of you is not a field station.

It is the office that translated a marsh ledger into network policy.

WWF later emptied the original pair of buildings and, around 2017, moved staff next door into the IUCN Conservation Centre at Rue Mauverney 28.

The 2019 photograph still shows the older WWF block from the road.

A visitor coming for her first Gland chapter should know the secretariat she joined is the older campus, not the IUCN glass box beside it.

Photo: Swadim, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons