Jakob Poffley

Jakob Poffley is a PhD student in the Conservation and Development Lab at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography and Conservation Research Institute. His work is supervised by Prof. Rachael Garrett and Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, and funded by the Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Risk (AI4ER CDT).

Jakob’s PhD research explores how different governance arrangements and policy combinations influence deforestation and related socio-environmental outcomes across the tropics. He investigates whether integrating policies into coherent mixes can overcome the limitations of individual instruments and support tropical forest conservation at scale. The research uses causal impact evaluation to attribute observed changes to policy developments and draws on land system science to understand indirect effects such as leakage and spillovers. Spanning multiple governance levels, the research focuses on public policy, jurisdictional approaches, and the EU Deforestation Regulation. It aims to inform international efforts to address tropical deforestation through more effective and coherent policy design.

Before his PhD, Jakob completed an MRes in Environmental Data Science with AI4ER, collaborating with TRAFFIC to develop data-driven tools to inform international policy on illegal wildlife trade. He previously studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Plant Sciences. His past research has included work on the UK’s biodiversity offsetting metric, novel wildlife monitoring approaches, climate change impacts on plant species distributions, and forest ecology.