Toby is a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) where he co-leads SEI´s Initiative on Producer to Consumer Sustainability and the newly launched Transparency for Sustainable Economies platform, Trase (www.trase.earth). Toby has fifteen years’ experience working on research and policy challenges facing the sustainable development of tropical landscapes. He is involved in a number of international environmental policy processes including as a Coordinating Lead Author and Liaison Expert for the global assessment on Land Degradation and Restoration of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Before joining SEI Toby was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge for five years, and helped found and coordinate theSustainable Amazon Network, a multi-institutional research network working on sustainable land use in Pará. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and in 2012 was awarded the biannual British Ecological Society’s Founders’ Prize for significant contributions to the science of ecology. Toby holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh (BSc, 2001) and the University of East Anglia (MSc, 2001; PhD, 2007).
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land change trade-offs for ecosystem services and biodiversity
A new study published in Science finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.
A new article in PNAS brings together detailed data on trade, agriculture, and logistics to produce a subnational map of the origin of Brazil’s exports of beef, offal, and live cattle. The work gives an unprecedented insight into the origin of food and impacts embedded in global supply chains.
GLP Members look at the soy trade in Brazil, the world's largest exporter, to analyze supply chain stickiness and explain why it is essential to curb deforestation. The research was published in One Earth.
Several GLP Members and SSC Member Patrick Meyfroidt are the guest editors of a focus collection in Environmental Research Letters. The ERL issue explores new ways to put tools and data to work towards improving our understanding of direct and indirect land-use change caused by governance interventions.
