Session
Environmental and social integrity through multiple-objective management of landscapes

Climate change and rapid growth in human consumption of food, fuel and fiber are driving agricultural expansion — especially in the tropics. This trend could accelerate tropical deforestation, releasing lots of carbon to the atmosphere, making climate change worse. Or, we can get out ahead of this problem and grow more food on lands that are already cleared. To change the crisis into a revolution we need to overcome the intense fragmentation that we’ve seen and we need to find ways to bring sectors together at a scale that actually makes a difference.

Video and transcript

Daniel Nepstad (PhD, Yale) is the Executive Director, President and founder of Earth Innovation Institute (formerly IPAM International Program), a research, policy and outreach organization that supports sustainable development in Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Kenya. He is a forest ecologist and land-use policy specialist and has studied the Amazon Basin for 30 years, with a focus on forest responses to climate change, land use, and REDD. Previously, he was Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, Chief Program Officer for Environment at the Moore Foundation, and Lecturer at Yale. He is a member of California’s REDD Offset Working group (ROW), the Board of Directors of Aliança da Terra, IPAM (which he co-founded) and Forest Trends, and was a Board member of the RTRS.  He is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, Working Group 2, AR5) and has published more than 140 scientific articles and 3 books.