Peter
Messerli
Director and Professor for Sustainable Development
Wyss Academy for Nature, University of Bern
Peter Messerli is professor for sustainable development and the director of the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. As a land system scientist and human geographer, his research interests lie in the sustainable development of social-ecological systems in Africa and Asia. He focuses on increasingly globalized and competing claims on land, rural transformation processes, and spatial manifestations of their outcomes in the Global South. Peter Messerli has lived and worked more than 10 years in Madagascar and Laos directing large-scale research projects focusing on inter- and transdisciplinarity. He has extensive experience in science-policy interactions from the local to the global level. From 2009 to 2020, he was the director of the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at the University of Bern. Peter Messerli is also the co-chair of Future Earth’s Global Land Programme (GLP) and occupies many functions in advising and guiding governmental, scientific, and civil-society organisations related to sustainable development. He was the co-chair of the independent group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary General to write the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) in 2019.