I am an Assistant Professor at McGill University, jointly appointed by the Institute for the Study of International Development and the Department of Geography. I am a development and environmental geographer, specializing in issues of land use change. My research examines the role of people’s livelihood and land use choices as a nexus between social and environmental, and global and local dynamics in rural areas of the Global South. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between globalization, human and capital mobility and land-use change, and its implications for development and environmental sustainability; and in the role of learning and adaptation processes in strengthening the resilience of rural communities in the face of environmental change. Before joining McGill, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University, USA.
Themes
Telecoupling of land use systems, Land governance, Land management systems
A new paper in PNAS demonstrates an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 years across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km2). The transferable and scalable methodology puts forest smallholders on the map and can help to uncover the land-use conflicts at play in many deforestation frontiers across the globe.
What started as a discussion at the 2019 GLP OSM is now a paper in the Journal of Land Use Science! In it, the authors aim to start a discussion on how to better include culture in land system science (LSS).
GLP Members Graham McDonald and Yann le Polain de Waroux write in BioScience that improved access to data on land prices is vital for future advances in global change science and policy. Spatially explicit land price information should be a public good available to the international community. An open-access, global land price database would enable policymakers, scientists, and civic society to better grapple with the economic, social, and environmental challenges posed by global change.
