Emmanuel de Merode is the Director of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He has spent the past 20 years working to sustain the national park through the DRC's civil war and to address issues of illegal resource extraction as the underlying causes of armed conflict. Given the chronic insecurity and the succession of violent wars in eastern Congo, de Merode has focused his efforts on economic development initiatives that bring greater stability to the region. In 2013 he assisted in the launching of the Virunga Alliance, an large scale economic development initiative based on the sustainable use of the region's natural resources to drive the post-war economy of eastern Congo as an instrument for peace-building in the region.