Dr. Elisa Raulings On Taking Practical Action For Nature And Restoring Biodiversity
Dr. Elisa Raulings is an Australian leader in ecological restoration and climate adaptation, with a wealth of hands-on fieldwork experience and a proven track record in large-scale restoration.
Holding a PhD in environmental science and studies in environmental risk assessment and garden design, she has spent years immersed in Australia’s wetlands, tracked Australia’s pollinators, and ventured to Africa to study orchids and moths—where she was unknowingly stalked by a leopard.
Dr. Raulings has spearheaded bold restoration initiatives to rewild Victoria’s endangered faunal emblems and has collaborated with farmers, banks, government bodies, and consultancies to embed nature in their strategies.
As CEO and Founder of Woop Woop, a social enterprise, Elisa is breaking away from traditional environmental organisations. She’s driving systems-level change through biodiversity innovation, unique partnerships and a fun approach, aiming to spark large-scale, practical action and create a richer world for people and nature.
Dr. Raulings discusses the increasing role of technology in ecosystem restoration, managing stakeholders to protect biodiversity, and why businesses and individuals must take action to mitigate their impact on the environment.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in environmental consulting and social enterprise?
[Dr. Elisa Raulings] - I'm one of those lucky people who has always had a very strong sense of my why; why I want to work and what I want to achieve in my life. I've also been lucky that my family, friends, colleagues and teachers have always encouraged me to follow my why and that they did not send me down another path.
As a child, I was very fortunate I did a lot of camping with my family, and I travelled around Australia for several months when I was younger. I think that experience gave me a strong sense of the Australian landscape, and when I was back at school in grade six, I won an award for making other people pick up litter in the school playground.
I remember being proud of this achievement, and that feedback and encouragement set me on the path to think about how we can look after the world. Over time I went on to study and I finished my PhD in botany. I studied these particularly crazy plants called trigger plants which move fast to whack insects.
I went on to do a lot of study and I developed a strong basis in science. I got to travel overseas to Africa to chase orchids [well I didn't chase the orchids; they weren't going anywhere] and study the moths pollinating them. I had some incredible experiences there.
After a brief period of traveling overseas and backpacking, I came back to Australia and worked for a little while with the government before I started this fantastic job at Monash University. I started a crazy large experiment there with a big wetland that hadn't been drained for 40 years. Wetlands need to dry out, sometimes it's good for them.
There was a big levy bank in the middle of this wetland, so we patched it up and drained half of the wetland out (about a thousand hectares). It was big and we kept the other half of the land full to see what happened. I think that's still one of the largest restoration experiments in the world in terms of discovering how we can go about restoring places.
After Monash University, I became a mum, and so for a little while I did a Graduate Certificate in Garden Design. After doing a PhD you might think this was easy, but it was very difficult and fun to think about the design element and how people see landscapes and what makes us feel good about those places.
Then I got this fantastic job at Greening Australia, and I worked there for 10 years. I was lucky to deliver amazing projects there with incredible people. One of my favourites was building habitats for Victoria's faunal emblems. Both are critically endangered animals, the Helmeted Honeyeater and the Leadbeater’s Possum.
We built a new site in which those animals are going to be rewilded next year, and we think that's almost a global first. It's exciting and a great privilege to be working with a huge team of people trying to save those species.
What I learned from that experience and what I started to think about is even though nature's complex, there are a lot of patterns. Knowing this, how can we start to take that patterning to scale up action for nature?
A year ago, I left Greening Australia to start my own business. ‘Woop woop’ is an Australian slang term for being in the middle of nowhere, and I chose that name partly because people think natures in the middle of nowhere and it's of no relation to them, but nature underpins everything in our lives.
I wanted to start that conversation, and I also think younger people like to ‘woop’ in the other sense of the word (celebrating), so that's the name I chose. This first year of my journey I've had a great time. I did an ag-tech accelerator called Sprout X and then I did one with Hatch and Impact Boom.
It was such a privilege to learn from the great minds of Tom Allen and others about how to step outside the scientific world to think differently about scaling impact for nature and what other skills and tools we might use. I've had this great first year where I’ve been working with farmers, corporates, and government organisations to scale practical action for nature.
As the Founder and CEO of Woop Woop for Nature, can you share more about how this impact led venture is generating an environmental impact?
We hear a lot about climate change, and we're all worried about it, but what we don't hear so much about and what I don’t like talking about (because it makes me sound like the fun police) is biodiversity loss. The loss of plants and animals is, as bad (if not worse) than climate change. That's the bad news, and it is very dire situation.
Plants and animals are busy out there doing invisible jobs supporting our lives in the big smoke. They might be small jobs like pollinating the food we eat they or turning over the forest to reduce fire risks, but there are lots of different jobs plants and animals do to help us.
The problem is we've lost 73% of wildlife populations in the last 50 years, that is a massive loss, and that's according to the Living Planet Report or Index by WWF. That's the bad news, and we are in a terrible situation.
Equally, we have all the tools, we know what to do, but we just need to start scaling practical action for nature. I’m excited and privileged to be at this turning point in the world, because the world is going to turn around quickly. I’m now thinking towards a much more nature positive outcome.
Scientists tell us we need to work towards 30% vegetation cover, and that's because 30% is a tipping point for species. Once we get below 30% vegetation cover, we start to lose species. If we get above that, we start to see a rebound.
In Australia, that 30% vegetation cover differs depending on the ecosystem type, but it’s approximately equivalent to restoring 11.6 million hectares of land. This is a massive restoration goal, and we need to do it in the next six years to avoid biodiversity collapse.
When I left my last organisation, I started thinking that 11.6 million hectares is a massive stretch goal. I then wonder how much are we restoring at this moment? I looked around at other organisations, and first, there's hardly anyone reporting on this.
Second, what I could genuinely find was only 16,000 hectares of restored land. Let's just say there's a whole lot of other people doing stuff off their own back, so maybe we're restoring about 50,000 hectares a year. We also know we're clearing around 500,000 hectares a year, so we have this enormous job ahead of us.
Woop Woop's mission is to think about that if we had to start from scratch, how would we scale action for nature? What would that look like and how would we do it differently?
I've spent the year talking to amazing people. I've gone out, spoken to lots of farmers walking around in mud and everything else to try and find out from the farmer's perspective what the key barriers are for them to scale action for nature?
I've been speaking to lots of amazing people in the environmental sector and trying to understand their problems, but also people in the horticultural sector. Surprisingly, they're all on standby waiting for the signal to start growing more native plants, so that's exciting.
I've also been speaking with corporates, banks, and big telecommunication companies to try and understand what the problems are from their point of view. We can then think about solutions for how we can bring these problems together to create shared solutions.
I'm working in this solution space now, and I'm excited to say I'm going to be announcing (not quite today but in maybe a month or so) a new partnership with a software company. We're going to focus on how can start to scale practical action for nature.
As an experienced biodiversity consultant, what actions would you recommend for businesses to reduce their impact on nature and build a nature-positive future?
A biodiversity consultant a little bit different from what we call ESG consultants. Biodiversity is one part of the environment and it's probably (not that I'm biased) the biggest key.
Everything else we do for the environment we do to either protect the living parts of the world, which is biodiversity, or the non-living bits, which is the abiotic things like the water and soil.
Even plastics and all that stuff eventually comes back to biodiversity and abiotic factors. ESG thinks more broadly about pollution and those other factors, whereas my biodiversity work involves the living things in the world and thinking about how we can help them by providing food or building new homes for them.
It's a bit like being a property developer for nature. I think a lot about what their homes look like, what they need to eat, and where we will build their community so they can get from place to place easily? That's my job, and I've been doing fantastic work over the last year.
I've supported restoration planning across 500 hectares in my first year which I'm happy with, and I've been supporting vegetation to improve the condition across 2000 hectares, so that's a good first step. But we've got about another 4 million hectares that we'd like to achieve restoring soon.
What I'd say is that everybody has a role in action. If you're a graphic designer, the CEO of a corporate organisation, or even an accountant, there is a role for everybody to play in biodiversity action even though it might seem a couple of steps away.
I've been privileged in the last year (and over many years before that) to work with banks and different types of corporates, primarily to understand how their businesses are dependent on nature? The first thing everyone can do is look down their supply chain to think about how their business is dependent on nature.
Where are those intersections? Every single business will be dependent on nature and exposed to risk, so what happens if you're a soft drink maker and your groundwater dries up. You may not be able to make that soft drink anymore, so you're going to have to find an alternative source.
There is not one company in the world that doesn't rely on nature, maybe only consulting companies. Even still, everyone has a dependency on nature and some nature related risks in their business models.
Companies can now use these great frameworks like the Science Based Targets Network Initiative to help set targets for the climate and nature. There are other tools like the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosure which helps you look at your supply chain and think in a structured way about your risks.
That's a great starting point for corporates, to look at their risk and then set targets. Now, what we want to do with those targets is to first use a mitigation hierarchy. Avoiding having an impact is the first step. Stop chopping stuff down and clearing land, but also how else can you stop your impact? Can you swap out your product for using recycled materials for example?
What are the things that you can do to reduce your impact, that's the most important step. The second step in the mitigation hierarchy is because we can't always offset our impact, we might have to do something else that's going to have a positive impact. In that case, what we do is mitigate our impact.
We might have to take down part of a tree over here, but we're going to give it space to grow back as we do construction for example. When we start to mitigate our impact, we might realise that while we can't avoid creating a certain product, we can do it in a better way that creates less pollution.
Sometimes even when you've avoided and mitigated your impact, you still can't reduce your impact. That's when you offset. That might be when you go to another company and say, "can you protect land in another location or take action to improve the condition of land in another location to offset the impact I'm creating over here?"
What’s important I think for businesses to consider is there are lots of lots of people out there doing stuff now. This sector is becoming the next cool thing, and so lots of people are moving in to make money. As a business, you must make sure you have good ecological knowledge and advice, and restoration people often think it’s just about planting stuff, but that's horticulture, not restoration.
You can be good at planting trees, but it doesn't mean you're restoring an ecosystem, and so we want to think about making sure we have the right skill sets. You can also keep an eye out for exciting new markets that might help you pay to act in the future.
There's a new market called the Nature Repair Market, and that might be an opportunity for companies to make money in the future by doing the right thing. How great would that be?
Why is technology a key enabler of innovation in preserving biodiversity, and how can changemakers better leverage technology to achieve impact?
There are so many promising technologies, and I feel excited for the future and its intersection with biodiversity. Even though I am a scientist, I'm not great at technology! I need to bring in other skill sets to help me with my work.
What I did in my early restoration was I thought that a lot of our sites are remote, and when you're standing in the paddock looking at a site you can't see the things that matter. Often, you're in a paddock and it looks dead flat, or you might be able to see there's a bit of a rise. But if you're a plant looking at that paddock, five centimetres can make all the difference in whether you grow or die.
The way moisture flows across the soil, different soil types, and whether a plant is on a hot or cool side is all amazing information we can now get from remote sensors and imaging. This information helps us better tailor our restoration solutions. I’m excited by data and how we can better use it to create stronger outcomes on the ground.
Rather than getting in a tractor and throwing transit plants out the back, you can put plants in the niches where they'll do the best. That's an exciting opportunity.
What I'm also seeing, and in fact one of my greatest LinkedIn posts ever was when I commented on a technology company who were basically having people jump out of a plane and throw seeds out of a box. It was very sexy and cool technology they were using, but if you know anything about ecology, it's not going to work.
The challenge with new environmental technology is you must still understand the fundamentals of ecology to make that technology work for you. I'm excited by bringing together these two domains and quite different skill sets.
Ecology is a complex science, so if we think about plants and animals, they're a bit like a cobweb. Every plant and animal are like the nodes of a cobweb, and they're connected by this invisible string. In the technology world, we see this similarly with social media networks, where everyone's a node of a cobweb, and then we're all connected in different ways.
Those complex models have been built for social media and other technologies like AI, and we can start to use all that to help people understand the complexities of nature, to make more informed decisions, and to visualise what restoration will look like.
When you visualise what a nature positive future looks like, it's much more beautiful than the areas we live in now. How exciting is it that we can show people what the future might look like.
I’m excited about technology, but I think people need to pay a lot of attention to the ecology and how it's incorporated.
Do you believe changemakers need to remember they can't take technology and throw it at problems without a fundamental understanding of what they’re addressing?
I have been reviewing a lot of technology to see what everyone else is doing, and what’s interesting is that there are not many people out there using it effectively. There's lots of great technology available that will tell you what your impact is, but it won't tell you practically what to do.
That's the niche we're trying to fill, where we have got great information, but what do you do with it? What's the next step to make a positive difference on the ground? How do you take all the information and get started?
What is required from consumers, businesses, and governments to make progress towards effective climate change adaptation?
I'm probably biased, but sometimes I think not as hard as we'd like to think it is. There are a lot of barriers in the way, but if we can get all those barriers out of the way, we know what some of the solutions are.
First, I should say that climate adaptation needs to happen urgently. We must adapt as people by preparing ourselves and our families. We need to think about what does that look like? As a practical example, in Victoria this year (perhaps even across Australia) we're going to have one of the hottest summers on record. What can we practically do as individuals to reduce that impact.
An obvious thing is you can go and plant some trees and grow creepers over your house. You can do a lot of things to cool your house down quite quickly. There are some very practical things we can do as individuals, but where I like to focus is on our ecosystems that are being impacted by climate change.
These ecosystems are unravelling, and we know that they're unravelling quickly. In fact, if you drive around (even in urban environments), you'll see trees are dying everywhere now and things are bad. But we have got lots of things we can do.
I won't talk too much about this today because it's going to be coming out quite soon, but I did some fantastic work with Greening Australia on planting designs that might help to reduce bushfire risks. We've done that in a way that is scalable hopefully into the future.
We also know farmers can start to prepare themselves for different climates in the future. We know that by planting a tree, depending on the shape of that tree and where you put it, it reduces the wind speed.
Now that might not sound useful, but when you reduce the wind speed, you reduce the evapotranspiration of your pasture, and so you're reducing the loss of the water from your pasture. This means practically you need to put less water on your crops, so you are starting to think about drought proofing your farm or reducing your requirements for water.
If you're a dairy farmer, cows experience heat stress at 21-22 degrees. At this point they start losing milk, so apart from addressing the animal welfare issues around heat stress, you are looking after the animals to maintain your milk production.
By putting a tree in a paddock in a carefully designed way, we can help farmers prepare for climate change. Their cows are going to be hotter for longer and they're going to lose milk therefore, but we can plant trees in certain ways to help those farmers and their cows to adapt.
There are certainly nature-based solutions we can implement, we just have to make them practical, safe, and scalable.
What are the most important traits you’ve observed in leaders you have worked with in the social enterprise space?
I feel so lucky to have worked with incredible people and organisations. One of my career highlights has been the Hatch Taronga program and working with all the incredible crew at the Taronga Conservation Society and Impact Boom. It was such a fantastic opportunity to step outside of my comfort zone of science and practical action to think differently in a supportive space with great leadership.
The other participants in the Hatch Taronga accelerator were incredible, and I learned so much from all of them as well as those in Sprout X. I’m lucky to be always coming across great leaders.
I've been thinking about what makes these people great, and I think first they have a clear sense of their why. A lot of people have this, and they know that they want to do something, or they know it's important to act.
They may not be able to because they might be constrained in some way or they haven't been encouraged, but all these leaders have a clear sense of their why and they have been able to chase their purpose. When you work in the environmental sector, you must have a risk appetite, because there are lots of risks and the sector has been on a bit of a wild ride for a long period of time.
The people who've been hanging in there have been just hanging on, and I think they are prepared to take risks and do things differently. We need in this new world that we're entering for people to take risks. Doing nothing and not doing anything is also a choice, so we need to make a choice of doing things that might fail, but at least we've given it a red-hot go.
An example of this is all the incredible work Zoos Victoria are doing to save the Leadbeater’s Possum and Helmeted Honeyeater. They are really having a go and throwing everything into their work.
You must be not scared to fail because you will fail sometimes. We must have a growth mindset that things will go wrong in the environmental sector. Plants won't always grow; they'll get flooded or eaten by cows. There's always going to be a drama, but we must just learn from that and grow.
The last thing I will say about traits is that being resilient and able to bounce back when things aren’t going well is important. I'm going to share a little secret with you. One of my favourite founders is not in the social enterprise space. It's also an unlikely choice for an environmental scientist.
There's a founder named Trinny Woodall who's the founder of a makeup and skincare brand overseas. The reason I love her is not because of what she's doing, but because she brings a sense of warmth to her work.
Trinny empowers her audience, and it feels so genuine, but also (and I'm sure maybe it's marketing) she has a slight craziness to her personality that is lovely. I admire her as a founder, and she was apparently rejected a hundred times before anyone would invest in her company, so she obviously displays resilience.
The other leader I'd like to mention is Tom Allen from Impact Boom who I had the great fortune of working alongside in the Hatch Taronga program. Tom is different from Trinny; he’s a thoughtful, fantastic leader who brings people along in a way where he's pulling them from the front but also pushing them from behind. He’s a fantastic person and I’m privileged to have met Tom.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?
I have so many organisations I love, but I won't bore you with them all because there are so many. I would like to call out one I think is fantastic, and I'm a little bit biased because I'm on the advisory committee of this start-up.
It’s called the Sustainable Floristry Network. It was started by Rita Feldmann and Ginger Briggs, and what they're doing is they're combining science with sustainability across the floristry network. They've developed incredible educational content, and I think they're one to watch.
They've had a massive influence on florists globally, and they’re ready to scale. They were part of a movement called No Floral Foam, and they changed the way florists do a lot of their practices.
They're a great group, and I'd like to shout them out today amongst a million others I could think of that are creating positive social and environmental change.
What is one action our listeners can take to build a brighter, nature positive future?
The one thing everybody can do (and you don't want to overthink this) is just pop down to your local nursery and start growing something. It doesn't matter if you're growing an indoor plant, or you have something small on your balcony. It doesn’t even matter if it dies and you need to replace it frequently because you're not very good at growing stuff.
Go out and do something in your backyard, dig up part of your lawn and plant something. Help us work towards that 30% goal. People think planting is hard, but planting is not hard. If things die, you learn and try again.
The one thing I would love everybody to go and do this weekend is to go and plant something somewhere in their house. It will make you feel good, and it will also help the world.
