Umair Shahid

Umair Shahid is a development professional who has been working with WWF for about 12 years He is experienced in working on sustainability, fisheries, climate change adaptation, ocean governance, environment education, resource mobilization and research.

Currently, Umair is the Indian Ocean Tuna Manager for WWF and works closely with the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission and its member states to improve fisheries in the Indian Ocean. He has worked on issues related to small-scale fisheries and large-scale tuna fisheries, mostly focusing on reducing bycatch of marine turtles, sharks and marine mammals.

For the past several years, he has been working along the coast of Pakistan and beyond, supporting conservation efforts in the region, such as in the Maldives, Sri Lanka, India, and Iran to improve the management of bycatch. He has been actively working on developing mitigation measures for tuna directed gillnet/driftnet fisheries and interacts regularly with fishermen, skippers and boat owners on a significant research project in the Pakistan tuna fleet. He helps to design bycatch policy in Pakistan, which is slowly bringing positive change.

Previously, Umair led the marine programme for WWF-Pakistan. Marine programmes, such as the regional tuna initiative, fishery improvement projects, mangrove conservation, market transformation, shark conservation and ABNJ tuna project are some of the spinoff initiatives that he has developed at WWF-Pakistan and raising three million US dollars.