Available to book
Steve Backshall MBE helps organisations build resilience and sustainability awareness through the lens of real-world exploration. A two-time BAFTA winner and MBE recipient, Steve is a leading wildlife, conservation, and leadership speaker recognised globally through the BBC's Deadly 60 franchise.
Steve Backshall MBE has spent decades exploring the planet's most remote and dangerous environments, turning first-hand encounters with wildlife into stories that move people to act.
A two-time BAFTA winner and MBE recipient, Steve is best known for the BBC's Deadly 60 franchise and has presented landmark series including The Secret Life of Bees, Ice Age: A Frozen Planet, Whale with Steve Backshall, and Our Changing Planet. His sell-out live tours across the UK and Australia have placed him in front of hundreds of thousands of people of all ages. Steve is also a published author, including his memoir Deep Blue and Wildlings: How to Raise Your Family in Nature.
Steve draws on real expeditions to some of the world's harshest landscapes to speak about resilience, leadership, conservation, and the human impact on the natural world. His sessions cover leadership under pressure, building a resilient mindset, confronting fear, and the urgent challenge of protecting the planet's ecosystems, translating complex environmental realities into clear, human stories that resonate across corporate, educational, and public audiences alike.
Audiences leave with a renewed sense of curiosity about the natural world and a sharper understanding of how boldness, preparation, and a clear sense of purpose drive meaningful results.
Topics, sessions and talks
The natural world is disappearing at a pace that most people struggle to comprehend, and Steve Backshall has witnessed it firsthand. In this session, he brings audiences closer to the ecosystems and species under greatest threat, making the case for conservation not as an abstract cause but as an urgent, collective responsibility. Compelling, visually rich, and grounded in decades of field experience, it is a session that changes how people see the planet they inhabit.
Steve Backshall has come face to face with some of the most formidable predators on the planet and built a career out of it. In this session, he explores what fear actually does to us, why the instinct to avoid discomfort is so powerful, and what happens when we choose to move through it anyway. Honest, specific, and grounded in real experience, it leaves audiences with a practical framework for stepping outside their comfort zones with purpose.
Steve Backshall has led teams through some of the most demanding environments on earth; places where the consequences of poor leadership are immediate and real. Drawing on decades of expedition experience, he examines what genuine leadership looks like under pressure: how confidence is built rather than assumed, how adaptability separates good leaders from great ones, and how the ability to bring others through difficulty defines those who leave a lasting mark.
Setbacks in the field are not the exception; they are the rule. Steve Backshall draws on a career spent navigating hostile terrain, unpredictable wildlife, and the physical and psychological limits of human endurance to explore what resilience actually means in practice. This session moves beyond motivational platitudes to examine how the capacity to absorb difficulty, adapt, and keep moving is built, and how those same habits translate directly into professional and personal life.
Climate change, habitat destruction, and unchecked human activity are reshaping the natural world at a rate that science is only beginning to fully document. Steve Backshall has spent decades in the environments most acutely affected, and in this session, he translates that experience into a clear-eyed account of what is being lost and why it matters. It is a session designed to inform, challenge, and move audiences toward a more deliberate relationship with the world around them.
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frequently asked questions
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To book Steve Backshall, email hello@getapeptalk.com or call PepTalk on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US), and one of our speaker agents will contact you within hours to confirm Steve's availability and speaking fee. If you can, please include your budget upfront – it helps us fast-track your request. It’s also helpful to know the date, format (virtual or in-person), location, and about your audience.
Steve Backshall structures his sessions around first-hand expedition accounts, using specific field encounters — with predators, remote ecosystems, and high-stakes team environments — as the primary vehicle for delivering frameworks on resilience, leadership, and conservation.
Steve Backshall MBE speaks on wildlife and conservation, confronting fear and building resilience, and leadership under pressure. He is a two-time BAFTA winner, MBE recipient, and presenter of the BBC's Deadly 60 franchise.
No. PepTalk adds no booking fee, so you pay the speaker's fee and nothing beyond it. The service, from shortlist through to contracts and event-day logistics, is included. For repeat or multi-event bookings, PepTalk can agree preferential rates with your procurement team.
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Three to six months ahead is comfortable for most events, and 12 months is better for large conferences, peak-season dates or one specific in-demand speaker. Shorter timelines are workable, and PepTalk regularly fills last-minute and replacement bookings within days. Availability is the constraint, so get in touch as soon as you have a date.
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