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Academics Qualifications

Ph.D. in Environmental Research from Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.

Research Areas

Conservation science; Ecological economics; Sustainability science; Land use change; Environmental health..

Research Interests

The main research focus of the Bioecon lab gravitates around sustainability. The lab aims at identifying strategies for the reconciliation of biodiversity conservation, food security and economic development in the tropics. The research developed in the lab deals with the complex interactions occurring in tropical socio-ecological systems. This complexity requires an interdisciplinary approach where biological models are linked to economics through bioeconomic modeling. Specific research topics of the lab are: tropical forests conservation, trade-offs between agriculture and ecosystem services and benefits to humans from nature. The lab is applied and quantitative. A wide range of mathematical, computational and statistical modeling approaches, many of which have a spatial component, are employed. Please send me an email if you would like to collaborate or be part of the lab. .

Current projects

Reconciliation of biodiversity conservation, food security and economic development in the tropics: (i) identification of mechanisms for global market systems to internalize the true economic value of tropical forests; (ii) performance of spatial analyses of land use distributions that maximize the synergies between ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and agricultural production; (iii) study of the wellbeing benefits provided by nature; and (iv) valuation of ecosystem services in Singapore.

Selected Publications

1. S.H.S. Teoh, W.S. Symes, H. Sun, T. Pienkowski, L.R. Carrasco (2019) A global meta-analysis of the economic values of provisioning and cultural ecosystem services. Science of The Total Environment 649, 1293-1298.

2. Symes W.S., Edwards D.P., Miettinen J., Rheindt F.E., Carrasco L.R. (2018) Biodiversity conservation assessments underestimate the combined threats posed by tropical land-use change and wildlife trade. Nature communications. 9 (1) 4052.

3. T. Pienkowski, B.L. Dickens, H. Sun, L.R. Carrasco (2018) Empirical evidence of the public health benefits of tropical forest conservation in Cambodia: a generalised linear mixed-effects model analysis. The Lancet Planetary Health. 1: 5, e180-e187.

4. L.R. Carrasco, J. Chan, F.L. McGrath, T.P.L. Nghiem (2018) Biodiversity conservation in a telecoupled world. Ecology and Society. 22 (3).

5. L.R. Carrasco, E.L. Webb, W.S. Symes, L.P. Koh, N.S. Sodhi (2017) Global economic trade-offs between wild nature and tropical agriculture. PLOS Biology 15(7): e2001657. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001657.