Rakan Zahawi: Giant ambitions at the Charles Darwin Foundation

Following on from two episodes recorded on San Cristóbal Island, this episode finds David having set sail across the Galapagos archipelago for Santa Cruz; destination: the headquarters of the Charles Darwin Foundation — the research institution founded alongside the Galápagos National Park, and still at the heart of how science becomes conservation on the islands.

Joining David is Rakan Zahawi, CDF’s relatively new Chief Executive. Rakan is a botanist and restoration ecologist who arrived after running botanical gardens in Hawaii and Costa Rica, and now helps steer one of the most ambitious ecological recovery efforts anywhere on the planet. At the centre of this conversation is the Floreana Project: a multi-decade initiative to restore the Galapagos island of Floreana to a natural state, one pre-dating humankind’s arrival in the Galapagos. By tackling invasive species at scale and rebuilding ecosystem function from the ground up, Rakan explains why removing cats and rodents is only the start, and how quickly native wildlife can rebound when pressure lifts — from finches and reptiles to the startling reappearance of the Galápagos Rail for the first time since Darwin’s 1835 visit. With that groundwork laid, attention turns to what comes next: a carefully sequenced programme of reintroductions, led by the recent (last week, no less!) return of giant tortoises to Floreana — hybrids, standing in for a lineage wiped out long ago — as a headline step in a restoration story decades in the making. All that, plus the methodical science behind biocontrol, the worries of a parasitic “avian vampire fly” that threatens Galápagos avian life, and what lies ahead for CDF and its present and future partnerships.

This episode was recorded live at the Charles Darwin Science Centre on Isla Santa Cruz in the Galápagos.

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