My research and teaching responsibilities are focused on global environmental change, land use transitions and food security in the Global South. Specifically, I have worked for two decades on the dynamics of forest-agriculture frontiers looking at how changes in land use affect socio-economic and environmental systems. I also work with climate change adaptation and mitigation and have a general interest in the interface between development, environmental management and land use change. My regional specialization is Southeast Asia and West Africa, but I have also worked in the Pacific, East and Central Africa and Latin America.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity , Land management systems
A new article in People and Nature that grew out of discussions at GLP's 2019 Open Science Meeting in Bern looks at what happens after shifting cultivation and finds eight transitions with varied consequences for people and nature.
A new article in Regional Environmental Change draws on insights from politics of scale to present a framework for analysing the multiple environmentalities of environmental governance in protected areas focusing on the construction of Nam Et-Phou Louey National Park in Lao PDR.
A new piece in Environmental Research Letters finds that countries with high forest cover and low deforestation (HFLD) are unlikely to be compensated fairly if REDD+ initiatives fail to conserve existing forests and to incentivize low deforestation rates.
The authors conclude that the narrow focus on specific ES categories strongly limits understanding of SF in shifting cultivation areas and that it is more relevant to compare SFs with other agricultural systems rather than with old-growth forests.
