Team

Prof. Dr. Jan Börner is an agricultural and environmental economist with applied research experience in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. He is Robert Bosch Junior Professor for Economics of Sustainable Natural Resource Use and Bioeconomy and leads the environmental policy research group at ZEF. As a Senior Associate researcher of the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) he has been involved in several global research projects on REDD+ and human environment interactions.

Position: Senior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Vanesa Rodríguez Osuna, environmental engineer, M.Sc. in Natural Resource Management and Technologies in the Tropics, PhD in Natural Sciences and Project Manager Specialist. Her past and present work relates to the sustainable use of biodiversity, integrated land and water management, climate change, environmental and economic assessment of ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental impact assessment, alternative market development and bridging the science-policy interface related to biodiversity and ecosystem services. Within these fields, she has worked as expert for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Conservation Strategy Fund, RARE, Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Secretariat/UNEP. Within the business sector, she has worked for SEQUA, the development agency of the four major German business associations and GIZ. She currently works as senior researcher at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn and at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences.

Position: Senior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Hugo Rosa da Conceição holds a B.A. in International Relations and a M.Sc. in Environmental Governance. He served for two years as a Junior Professional Associate at the World Bank office in Brazil, in the Sustainable Development sector, working on projects at the Brazilian Amazon region. As a junior researcher at ZEF, he’s working with political contexts, institutional structures, design and implementation of incentive-based forest conservation programs in the Amazon Region

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Johannes Schielein holds an M.Sc. in Geography from the university of Bonn and collected experience in the field of environmental policies while working as a consultant for the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) in Brazil. During his doctoral stay at ZEF, he analyzes land-cover change dynamics in different deforestation frontiers of the Amazon. His work will contribute to better understand the efficiency of environmental policies in different local settings and the influence of local economic factors. Johannes works with a combination of statistical modeling techniques and spatial (GIS) analysis.

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Elías Cisneros is an environmental economist with an research interest in the public economics of deforestation. His study area ranges from Brazil, Peru to Indonesia. He analyses the role of local governance for the environment combining spatial data and geo-localized policy interventions. His research informs scholars and political stakeholders to better understand and shape policies that aim to conserve natural resources while securing the well-being of society.

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website
Personal Homepage


Javier Miranda is an economist and holds a master in public policy. As junior researcher at ZEF, he analyses policy instruments, its effects on land use choices and resulting trade-offs in Brazil. Previously, he had worked for the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC-Mexico), for the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) in Namibia, and as an external consultant for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). His professional experience has focused on environmental economics and natural resource management topics; particularly, he developed spatially explicit econometric models and rural surveys to identify drivers of land use.

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Renzo Giudice Granados is an ecologist and holds an MSc by research degree on environmental economics and land use and land-cover change modeling with applied research experience in Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. His work experience and interest is to combine policy and applied interdisciplinary research to support the design of cost-effective forest conservation policies. His current Ph.D. research topic at ZEF is an impact evaluation of the National Forest Conservation Program of Peru on avoiding deforestation within indigenous lands using remote sensing data and geographic information systems. He also undertook this research as part of his former research position at the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) in Peru.

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Gabriel Ponzoni Frey is a biologist and holds an M.Sc. in Ecology by the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His background is in biodiversity generation and maintenance, plant community assembly and phylogeny, with extensive fieldwork experience in the Atlantic and Amazon Forests, as well as lab experience with DNA barcoding techniques. His Ph.D. at ZEF has focused on tropical forest bioeconomy and modern agricultural frontier development, especially land-use changes, secondary forest regeneration and restoration of forest ecosystem services in the Brazilian Amazon. Gabriel has developed spatial (GIS) analysis skills and uses niche and vegetation modeling techniques in his Ph.D.

Position: Junior Researcher
ZEF Staff Website


Nathália Nascimento is a geographer, Ph.D. in Earth System Sciences from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE-Brazil) and has a background in land use dynamics, especially in the Amazon region. During her doctorate, she worked with modeling land use decisions in agricultural frontier zones in the Brazilian Amazon. She is currently involved in research projects distributed in Latin America and the Caribbean, focusing on understanding the correlation between policies and land use dynamics in the countries of this region and on projects focused on the study of ecosystem services (beyond carbon) provided by forests of South America.


Florian Reimer is a geographer and mainly concerned with payments for ecosystem services (PES), especially forest carbon markets including REDD+. Here his focus are techniques for Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV). He executes work in the fields of GIS, remote sensing work, forest stock asessment and analysis land-use change. He is therefore involved especially in analysis of historic deforestation, baseline establishment, reference area evaluation, and modelling of future land-use change. He also designs forest carbon inventories, undertakes capacity building for local forest managers and communities. From purely technical applications he is developing his skills for participatory community monitoring of social effects of conservation initiatives and biodiversity monitoring. He contributes to specific research fields, while working in the private sector as a forest carbon project manager. He has participated in validations and verifications of more than 5 projects successfully issuing and selling credits on voluntary and compliance markets.


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