Noelia Zafra Calvo joins UNU-IAS as a JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow. She is interested in applied science, specifically in conservation biology strategies and their links to socio-economical and governance issues at the implementation stage. Her previous academic work focused on the application of systematic conservation planning methods in developing countries, paying special attention to socio-economic factors and off-reserve actions for management of post-agricultural areas.
She also has ten years of professional experience coordinating and advising on conservation biology and sustainability, and conservation agriculture and agro forestry in African countries for government programmes, international NGOs and companies.
Her research at UNU-IAS explores how different strategies for off-reserve conservation perform under different property-rights regimes of natural resources, and combinations that are the most cost-effective to be applied under limited funding. Her focus is on African countries.
She holds a degree in Environmental Sciences and a PhD in Global Change and Sustainable Development from the University of Alcala, Spain.