Newcastle University's sustainability professorship for oil heir sparks backlash

Newcastle University announced in September that it had appointed Anant Ambani as a professor of practice, citing his work in conservation, biodiversity protection, animal welfare, and environmental stewardship. The appointment landed like a stone in still water. Within days, conservationists, academics, and environmental investigators began asking the same question: how did the heir to an Indian oil and gas fortune—a man worth an estimated £90 billion whose family made its wealth primarily in fossil fuels—end up holding a sustainability professorship at a British university?

Ambani, 31, is the son of Mukesh Ambani, India's richest person and owner of the world's largest oil refinery through his Reliance conglomerate. The younger Ambani serves as executive lead for the group's renewable energy transition, a role that sits in obvious tension with his family's core business. But the real source of the backlash was not his lineage or his employer. It was Vantara, the 1,400-hectare private zoo he runs near the family's refining facilities in Gujarat. The facility houses more than 150,000 animals, including 200 lions, 250 leopards, and 900 crocodiles. Ambani hosted his lavish pre-wedding celebrations there in 2024, an event attended by celebrities and politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The zoo's origins raised immediate red flags among wildlife experts. In 2025, an investigation by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung found that many animals delivered to Vantara had arrived through countries with opaque wildlife trading networks, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United Arab Emirates. Conservation groups questioned how so many endangered species had been sourced. A fact-finding mission by Cites, the UN body regulating trade in endangered species, discovered that some of the permits used to import animals to Vantara were probably forged. The Cites report warned that large-scale animal imports by facilities like Vantara could be creating demand for illegally sourced animals. Vantara has never been found guilty of wrongdoing. An investigation by India's supreme court, completed in less than three weeks in August of the previous year, cleared the zoo's operators. The Ambani family has consistently denied trafficking allegations, stating that their mission remains the rescue, rehabilitation, and care of animals. In August, Vantara announced a "reset" of its operations, appointing a former Cites head to oversee procedures and voluntarily pausing all wildlife imports until June of the following year.

Ramachandra Guha, a leading Indian public intellectual and author of Speaking With Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, responded to the appointment with bewilderment. He said he could name at least 50, perhaps 100, individuals far better qualified for such an honor—soil scientists, energy scientists, water conservation experts, community forest workers, ecologists, and pollution abatement experts who had made tangible contributions to sustainability in India. Guha questioned whether Newcastle had conducted proper due diligence and warned that the appointment was likely to damage the university's institutional credibility and intellectual standing. Bhuvan Mangalore, an Indian investigator into illegal wildlife trade completing a dissertation on Vantara at Anglia Ruskin University, simply asked: "Is this a joke?"

The objections extended beyond India. Matt Perry, chair of the University and College Union branch at Newcastle, said staff members had raised environmental concerns about the appointment. Lyla Mehta, head of the climate, environment and sustainability department at the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies, flagged a deeper institutional worry: as public funding for universities declined, there was real danger that billionaire and corporate money would begin shaping academic priorities. "Universities are supposed to be places that question power and hold corporations to account, not give them academic legitimacy," she said. Lorne Stockman, a research co-director at Oil Change International, added that at a moment when the climate crisis demanded an urgent phase-out of oil and gas, publicly funded institutions needed to do better.

Newcastle University defended the appointment through a spokesperson, saying the professorship of practice recognized Ambani's contributions to conservation and biodiversity protection through Vantara and his role leading Reliance's green energy transition. The university did not address the specific concerns about wildlife trafficking, the forged permits, or the apparent contradiction between appointing a sustainability professor from an oil and gas dynasty at a moment when the world's leading climate scientists are calling for the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels. The appointment stands as a test case for how universities navigate the tension between financial need and intellectual independence—and whether accepting money and prestige from billionaires can coexist with the institution's stated mission to question power.