Dekila Chungyalpa, Loka Director

Dekila is the Founder and Director of the Loka Initiative. Known as an innovator in the environmental field, she has over two decades of experience working on building resilience, faith-led environmental and climate partnerships, biodiversity landscape and river basin strategy design, and community-based conservation. Dekila has designed and launched four unique faith-led initiatives, Khoryug in the Himalayas, Sacred Earth at the World Wildlife Fund, YETI at the Yale School of Environment, and now Loka at UW-Madison. Dekila has worked all around the world, including in the Amazon, East Africa, the Himalayas, the Mekong, and the US. She originally hails from Sikkim, a Buddhist-kingdom-turned-Indian-state in the Himalayas, and is of Bhutia origin. She is a sought after public speaker and has spoken at the American Museum of Natural History, Bioneers, Harvard, Mind and Life, National Geographic, Stanford, and Yale, and sits on the board or advisory committee for several organizations including Green The Church, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and the Society of Conservation Biology’s Religion and Conservation Working Group.