Joel Correia

I have worked for 20+ years alongside community partners in Latin American and East Africa to address some of the most challenging contemporary social and environmental challenges. My work is inspired by the transformative power of collaborative action, learning across epistemologies, and the urgency of today’s grand challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, and resurgent authoritarianism.

As a human-environment geographer, I investigate how landscape change and natural resource governance shape societal inequalities manifest as climate and environmental injustice among Indigenous and front-line communities in Latin America. Specifically, I study the uneven effects of development-driven environmental change, particularly the destruction of South America’s largest forests — the Amazon and the Gran Chaco — and social responses to that change. My work is rooted in qualitative social science and public political ecology but transgresses traditional disciplinary boundaries through diverse mixed-methods and engaged in-situ research with front-line communities, human rights advocates, policy makers, and scientists.

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado USA. I am co-Director of a new transdisicplinary initiative: the Just Social-Ecological Transformations in Latin America Program (JSET). See www.jset-la.org.

My research is currently supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Andes-Amazon Initiative as well as the National Science Foundation.