Thomas Mathew

Thomas Mathew (1948-2025) was among the founding members of the Wildlife Trust of India and served as the first chair of its board. He came to it from the top of the established conservation sector, having been secretary general and chief executive of WWF India during a period of rapid growth for that organisation, and director of conservation in the Asia programme of WWF in the United States. He also worked as a consultant to the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, the United Nations Environment Programme and UNIDO.

WTI was formed in 1998 by a team of three in response to what its founders saw as a set of converging crises facing Indian wildlife and habitats, and its distinguishing choice was to work in direct partnership with government forest departments and with local communities rather than at a distance from them. Mathew chaired the board through its first years, and colleagues have credited him with establishing the organisation's institutional foundations and with mentoring younger conservationists; his own view, as they recall it, was that caring for nature could not be separated from caring for people. The trust now runs more than forty conservation projects across India, from the Pir Panjal in Kashmir to the mangroves of Kannur and whale shark waters off Gujarat, working on wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, securing elephant corridors, human-wildlife conflict reduction, anti-poaching enforcement and habitat protection outside the formal protected-area system.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1994 for services to international conservation, and received a certificate of merit from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in 1998.[2][3][4]