Sydney Moss

Sydney is a PhD student in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department at UC Berkeley. She researches non-state conservation actions within Indigenous territories to identify levers for increasing community self-determination of land and water. Before starting her PhD, she worked with the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) at Stanford University. With NatCap she researched biodiversity policy mixes in Colombia, stakeholder engagement in ecosystem service modeling, and pathways to better incorporate natural capital and biodiversity ecosystem services into multilateral development finance in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region. Her past work at Ecocity Builders and Forest Trends included participatory action research with communities, academic institutions, and governments to develop bottom-up sustainable land use and resource conservation plans at the community, urban, and peri-urban scales. While formally trained at Loyola University-Chicago and UC Berkeley, Sydney has acquired her most valued knowledge and expertise from project partners while conducting participatory research and implementing projects directly in the communities, classrooms, and government offices.