Yulia Stange is the Director for the Nature Crime Alliance working with the Forest Legality Initiative (FLI), the Forests Programme more widely, the Oceans Programme, the Food and Land Use (FOLU) Secretariat and partnering with the Meridian Institute to develop and launch a Global Alliance on Environmental Crime (GAEC) – a mutlistakeholder initiative to address illegal logging, illegal fishing, illegal mining and illegal conversion of lands and forests to agriculture.

Before joining WRI, Yulia was a Senior Manager with the Climate & Forests Programme at environmental law charity ClientEarth, coordinating and managing first the Central and West African forest law and governance and community forestry projects, and then also the illegal logging & trade, and deforestation commodities projects in Europe and internationally - including China. Previously, Yulia worked as a consultant on forest governance issues with clients including the African Development bank, the Congo Basin Forest Fund, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Prior to that, she spent two years working in Kenya at the UN Environment Programme on a multistakeholder global partnership to conserve great apes and their forest habitat across 21 countries in equatorial Africa and SE Asia. Yulia has also worked in Canada for the federal government to manage the terrestrial component of a funding programme for aboriginal groups to manage endangered species on their lands and territories, and at a university research institute to measure carbon stocks in the forests of Western Canada.

She holds a M.Sc. in Environmental Change Management from the University of Oxford and a B.Sc. in Natural Resources Conservation from the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Her mother tongue is German and she speaks fluent English and French, as well as some Spanish and Swahili. In her free time, Yulia enjoys backpacking trips in the Canadian wilderness, birdwatching in her UK backyard, and rowing on the local river.