Natural Justice and community protocols

Jonas completed his legal training contract at Trowers and Hamlins. In 2007, Jonas and Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte co-founded Natural Justice: Lawyers for Communities and the Environment in South Africa, as a not-for-profit organization specializing in legal empowerment and public interest law with a focus on human rights and environmental justice.^[6] While working with the Khomani San people and living in Upington, South Africa,^[4] Jonas advanced community protocols as a participatory legal awareness methodology and advocacy tool.^[7] Community protocols were included in the Nagoya Protocol in 2010. Indigenous peoples and local communities can now publish their protocols on the Access and Benefit Sharing Clearing-House to protect their interests.^[8]

Other effective area-based conservation measures

Jonas moved to Sabah, a Malaysian state in Borneo, in 2010 as part of his work on human rights and environmental issues.^[4] In 2014, Jonas, Ashish Kothari and other activists affiliated with the ICCA Consortium proposed that defining the term other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) offered an opportunity to better recognize the conservation of biodiversity by diverse groups in sites "beyond protected areas".^[9][10] Jonas co-chaired the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas Task Force on OECMs with Kathy MacKinnon, which delivered its report to Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2017.^[11] Decision 14/8 on protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures was agreed in 2018, setting out the international definition and criteria for OECMs.^[12] In 2022, OECMs were referenced in Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for the conservation of at least 30% of the Earth. As of February 2023, OECMs cover 1,949,484 km² of the Earth's surface.^[13]

Jonas’s work on the OECM framework is considered to have “caused a paradigm shift in area-based conservation”.^[14] In a Mongabay article, Jonas was quoted as saying that the OECM framework requires government agencies and other conservation actors to be "more inclusive and more focused on conservation outcomes".^[15] In 2021, Jonas became Senior Director for conservation areas at the World Wildlife Fund, based in Washington, DC, which is part of a network of organizations affiliated with the World Wide Fund for Nature.^[1]

Films

In 2021, Jonas produced Nature Stewardship Beyond Protected Areas, a documentary film about local conservation efforts in South Africa.^[16]

Written publications

Jonas is the author or co-author of over 60 publications exploring human rights, legal empowerment, conservation justice, protected areas, other effective area-based conservation measures, and global advances in area-based conservation.^[17] Works of note are listed below.