Landscape Manager, Wildlife Conservation Society

Jessica Graham serves as the President of JG Global Advisory, LLC a minority, women-owned small business in the Washington, DC area that provides integrated solutions responding to the challenges of environmental security. Through strategic policy and planning, business development, and project management, Jessica has supported hundreds of conservation NGOs around the globe to secure tens of millions of dollars in funding to protect biodiversity. She previously worked with INTERPOL’s Illicit Trade Sub-Directorate and also served as a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of State where she created the wildlife crime program for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) and served as a negotiator working on crime, biodiversity and climate change issues in the United Nations. With over 15 years of dedicated experience working on international issues, she regularly lectures and implements global projects for both the non-profit and private sectors. Her leadership has been instrumental in developing environmental crime programs and facilitating partnerships aimed at counter wildlife trafficking projects. Her work has impacted long-standing policy and capacity-building efforts across continents, from Africa to Latin America and Asia, reflecting her deep commitment to enhancing global security and conservation.
She serves on the Board of several international and locally based organizations in Washington, DC that are dedicated to the environment and empowering youth and founded a non-profit organization aimed at protecting vulnerable communities from global insecurity. Jessica received her Master’s degree from the University of California, San Diego where she studied International Politics, Environmental Policy, and Chinese Studies and holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida.
Jessica has conducted research and published several pieces on wildlife crime, including co-authoring a chapter in Women and Wildlife Trafficking: Participants, Perpetrators, and Victims, reviewing the zero instances of corruption in all-female anti-poaching units across Africa in an academic textbook in March 2022.

#MineAlert is a website and app that alerts residents and organisations to mining applications in their regions. It aims to promote public and private sector accountablity in the mining sector, to advance civil society and socio-economic rights, to protect the free flow of information, and to strengthen justice and equality.

#MineAlert-Africa is a geo-journalism platform documenting biodiversity threats posed by mining licenses across the African continent. It confronts official boundaries of mining licenses across over 21 African countries against protected areas, allowing journalists for a quick verification of any license holders operations. The data featured covers a snapshot taken in November 2023.

The Critical Minerals Dashboard locates mining projects of critical minerals and Rare Earth Elements (REEs) in Latin America, considering the strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Data is sourced from multiple open-source channels and will be regularly updated and expanded.

Map created by Amazon Georeferenced Socioenvironmental Information Network (RAISG) to map illegal mining in protected territories of the Amazon.

“Gold Library” – database with samples obtained from different parts of Brazil that allows the federal police to create a chemical fingerprint of each sample, which they can then use to cross-reference the origin of seized or suspicious gold.

Supply chain tracking using blockchain.

Monitors the advance of gold mining via satellite and radar in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios in Peru, a country where the “gold rush” has devastated more than 237,000 acres (96,000 hectares) of primary forest over the past 30 years. It can overcome the limitation that satellites encounter when trying to capture photos of the forest on a cloudy day. RAMI’s radar monitoring can “see” through clouds and thus provide information about the forest without weather patterns getting in the way.