Global impacts of agricultural trade and consumption on ecosystems and biodiversity

GRADED 

Project Team 

Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre 

Thomas Kastner 

Thomas is a Senior Scientist at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre. He leads a research group on how global trade and consumption of agricultural and forestry products can contribute to moving towards more sustainable land-use practices. He has almost 20 years of experience in research on global land use, biomass metabolism and environmental consequences of food production and consumption. 

Florian Schwarzmüller 

Florian is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre. He holds a PhD in Theoretical Ecology and is interested in the consequences of anthropogenic global change on biodiversity. Over the last years, Florian has worked through several projects on consumption-based accounting methods for environmental impacts. In GRADED, he is working on the trade models and different global biodiversity-impact metrics. Florian is also interested in science communication and a little bit obsessed with data visualization.   

Gabriela Rabeschini 

Gabriela is a Doctoral Researcher interested in the interlinkages between biodiversity and food systems, including processes of transition towards sustainable food production and consumption and biodiversity-driven agroecosystem services. She is also interested in science communication and education. 

Manuela Gómez Suárez 

Manuela is a Master student interested in anthropogenic effects on biodiversity and how species cope with and adapt to environmental changes, with a special interest in mammals and birds.  

Stockholm Environment Institute York 

Chris West 

Chris is the SEI York Deputy Director for Research and leads SEI York’s Sustainable Consumption and Production group. At SEI, he has led and contributed to a number of projects developing an understanding of the links between international supply chains and environmental impact and risk, which includes the development of SEI’s hybrid multi-regional input output model (IOTA) and material flow platform (Trase). He engages actively (including via workshops and other face-to-face activities) with policy, business and third-sector practitioners in the development of this work. 

Simon Croft 

Simon is a mathematician and modeller in the Sustainable Consumption and Production group at SEI York. He works predominantly on the modelling of supply chains and commodity flows of agri-goods and food, including the development of SEI’s Input-Output Trade Analysis (IOTA) model and associated indicators, and on the Trase platform. 

Chalmers University of Technology 

Martin Persson 

Martin is a professor in Land use science at Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. His research interests include climate and conservation policy, with a special focus on tropical deforestation, trade and environment, greenhouse gas metrics, and the economics of climate change. 

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) 

Marcelo Inacio da Cunha 

Marcelo Inacio da Cunha is an Economist (MSc) with a PhD in Geography and works as adviser at GIZ’s Sustainable Agricultural Supply Chains Initiative (INA). Marcelo’s doctoral thesis focused on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with local livelihoods that are reliant on supply chains in forest-agricultural landscapes.