BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2008), Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III (August 22, 1941 – December 25, 2021) was an American ecologist who was President of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a university professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University.

He was a past chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF),[3] the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.

[10][11] Lovejoy developed the debt-for-nature swaps,[12][13] in which environmental groups purchase shaky foreign debt on the secondary market at the market rate, which is considerably discounted, and then convert this debt at its face value into the local currency to purchase biologically sensitive tracts of land in the debtor nation for purposes of environmental protection.

Critics of the 'debt-for-nature' schemes, such as National Center for Public Policy Research, which distributes a wide variety of materials consistently justifying corporate freedom and environmental deregulation, aver that plans deprive developing nations of the extractable raw resources that are currently essential to further economic development.

A. Wilcox in June 1978 for The First International Conference on Research in Conservation Biology, that was held in La Jolla, in September 1978.

Lovejoy served on many scientific and conservation boards and advisory groups, and was the author of numerous articles and books.

Lovejoy has been granted the 2008 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category (ex aequo with William F. Laurance).

[20] On October 31, 2012, Lovejoy was awarded the Blue Planet Prize for being "the first scientist to academically clarify how humans are causing habitat fragmentation and pushing biological diversity towards crisis."

[25] In 2018, Lovejoy co-founded the Amazon Biodiversity Center[26] to support the work of the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project.