Phil Tovey is the Director of Nature-Centric Approaches to systemic risk assessment at ASRA. He is responsible for initiating and managing a new effort on non-human sanctity, inherent value, and agency as it relates to systemic risk assessment and response, and recognizes the interconnectedness of all life forms and the importance of preserving the integrity and health of other species and ecosystems for their own sake. 

Prior to this, Phil was the Head of Futures in UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) where he established and led pioneering foresight research and futures practice within the Central Science Division. Under the Chief Scientific Adviser, Phil led government foresight efforts on a diverse range of topics from Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenarios (ASRS), superforecasting future biological threats to animals, plants and fungi, and global assessments of ecosystem collapse, to interspecies democracy in freshwater systems, environmental ethics of human augmentation and more-than-human goal alignment for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2022, he led the foresight analysis supporting the UK’s first legally binding environmental targets under the Environment Act 2021. Before Defra, Phil worked within UK policing, primarily as an embedded researcher supporting the Cultural Change, Leadership, and Ethics Programme for Avon and Somerset Police. 

A former Royal Marines Commando, Phil has served on operations across the world, from peacekeeping in Northern Ireland to working with indigenous forces in Afghanistan and high-profile, short-notice deployments across Africa and the Middle East. 

Phil holds an MSc by Research in Preventative Strategy (Policing) and is pursuing a PhD focused on the eco-phenomenological dimensions of temporality in riverine environments through augmented human senses, centred on his own River (Tone) in Somerset, England. Phil is currently a Visiting Research Fellow with the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading and a member of the Advisory Board for the ESRC Centre of Sociodigital Futures, University of Bristol.