English botanist and environmentalist, born in Checkendon, Oxfordshire, the son of Russian artist Vladimir Polunin and an English mother. Nicholas Polunin read Botany and Ecology at Oxford University before studying for a Master's degree at Yale, and later obtained a professorship from Oxford. He was briefly employed as a research associate at Harvard University.

Polunin took part in a number of Arctic expeditions discovering plants in Greenland (1936) introduced by the Vikings, two new islands which he later named Charles Island and Air Force Island, and become a pioneer of aerobiology by demonstrating that pollen grains and spores existed high above the North Pole. He was appointed Macdonald Professor of Botany at McGill University (1947-1952) and later developed the Department of Botany at the University of Baghdad (1955-1958), before fleeing the Revolution of 14 July 1958. In 1959 he moved to Switzerland, at the invitation of the University of Geneva, where he published on biogeography. Briefly, he returned to the tropics where he participated in establishing the Faculty of Science at the University of Ife (1962-1966), now Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, before returning to Switzerland.

Turning to conservation, Polunin became founding editor of the journal Biological Conservation (1967-) and later created the Foundation for Environment Conservation and became editor of its journal Environmental Conservation (1974-). A pioneer of the environmentalist movement for more than 30 years, he promoted the importance of the global ecological concept of the biosphere and was elected to the UNEP Global 500 Roll of Honour Award 1991.