Five months after Jane Goodall’s death in 2025, her grandson Merlin Van Lawick says he is still taking things “one day at a time.”
Speaking to Mongabay at the ChangeNOW 2026 environmental forum in Paris, Van Lawick said the past year had been hard on his family, but he was stepping forward for the Jane Goodall Institute’s work.
“I think it’s been a very difficult year for my family and me, especially after losing our grandmother late last year,” he said.
“If you had honestly asked me to do this interview just two months ago, I wasn’t able to. I’m doing a lot better now … taking it one day at a time. The world has to go on. We still have a lot to do with the mission, and we’re not going to give up.”
Van Lawick was born, raised and still lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He told Mongabay he has been connected to the Jane Goodall Institute, founded by his grandmother, for “as long as he can remember”.
He now works across the institute’s conservation science, communications and youth program teams.
“I am currently working for the conservation sciences team. My time is [divied] into different departments within the organization,” he said.
Van Lawick said he spent years “learning through doing” in the field in Tanzania before starting an MBA at Arden University in the United Kingdom.
He said his grandmother’s lessons still shaped how he worked and lived.
“She always used to say that we all make a difference every day, and that we have to decide what sort of difference it’s going to be for us,” he said.
“One thing I want many people to understand is: no one can fill the gap that Jane has left. Jane was very special. No one is ever going to be her.”
He said he was grateful for the support sent to the family after her death.
“I’m very thankful for the amount of love and support that has been pouring in from all over the world,” he said.
“If anyone here is listening out there, then I just want to say thank you, my family and I really appreciated this.”
Van Lawick described Goodall as a grandmother who did not force people into a path, but instead made them think through the consequences of their decisions.
“She never told people what to do,” he said.
He said that as a child he had wanted to be a football player, but remembered Goodall telling him: “Merlin, I know you’re going to become a conservationist when you grow up. You don’t know it yet, but I know it.”
Van Lawick said he grew up outdoors in Tanzania, spending time in the ocean, on the beach and in the forest, and developed a love of animals from a young age.
At the Jane Goodall Institute, he said conservation science includes satellite imagery to monitor forest health, mobile technology for community reporting, and possible future use of AI to help search a database built from 60 years of research.
In communications, he said he promotes advocacy efforts to journalists, does public speaking and coordinates between global bureaus.
He also works with Roots & Shoots, the institute’s youth-led program, alongside his sister in Tanzania.
“We go into schools, talk to the students about the program and ask who is interested, and let them identify issues in their communities and come up with their solutions,” he said.
“It’s youth-led. We don’t tell them what to do.”
He said Roots & Shoots has about 4,000 clubs across Tanzania, based on recorded figures.
Van Lawick also spoke about funding pressure on the institute after USAID cuts.
“Last year, we had the USAID cuts while the JGI had actually won a grant for $30 million for the next five years,” he said.
“And we weren’t even done with the first year when USAID got cut. So we have a $30 million gap in our funding for projects that we had planned.”
He said the institute had to let go of “60-plus staff members” and was now trying to maintain its presence on the ground while looking for new sources of support.
“We are also trying to strategize differently now: breaking down the programs that we had in the past into smaller pieces that could be funded separately and diversifying our donors,” he said.
He said the organisation was also seeking smaller funding sources, including corporate groups that matched its environmental standards.
“We don’t take money from [just] anyone. That’s very important for us,” he said.
Asked about hope, Van Lawick repeated a line he said Jane Goodall often used.
“Jane used to talk about a way to conceptualize hope. She would say: Imagine you’re in a tunnel, a dark tunnel. And at the end of the tunnel, there were these lights. This light symbolizes hope,” he said.
“What you have to do is start crawling towards that light. You have to get over obstacles, under obstacles, push against them. Do what you can to get to that light at the end of the tunnel. Hence, hope is rooted in action.”
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