de Bremond, Ariane

Bio

I am Executive Director of the Global Land Programme (www.glp.earth) a Global Research Network of Future Earth.  As of February 2023, GLP's International Programme Office moved from the University of Bern, Switzerland to its new home at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My work and research aim to improve understanding of how land systems serve as the ‘meeting ground’ for multiple claims on land for livelihoods, biodiversity, carbon, food production, among others. Throughout my work, I seek to co-design and co-produce knowledge and link science to action towards just and better futures for people and nature.

I am an integrative geographer, employing the interdisciplinary toolbox of land systems science to build systemic understandings of contemporary dynamics of economic globalization, land governance, and tenure security and their interactions with land use and livelihood processes.

My research is also informed by over 20 years of experience in natural resource management, community environmental governance, and land tenure/land use processes on the ground in Central and South America and West Africa. I have worked in a wide range of development contexts, from war to post-conflict reconstruction in Guatemala and El Salvador, and as a development practitioner, UN peacekeeper, and researcher. My doctoral research on conflict, land reform and land use in El Salvador supported a deeper understanding of challenges and solution spaces linking peacemaking and environmental governance in post-war Latin America.

In our NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) synthesis project, “The Global Land Rush: A Socio-Environmental Synthesis” (2017- 2022), we developed an integrated synthesis of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) employing case studies in Argentina, Cambodia, and Laos to advance synthesis methods for understanding linked socio-environmental causes and consequences of land change.

I am Associated Senior Research Scientist at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern, Switzerland and Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute.