Niels Debonne is an assistant professor in the Environmental Geography department at the Institute for Environmental Studies. His research and teaching is concerned with the sustainability of the land system. He has done research on topics ranging from large-scale land acquisitions to European agricultural sustainability, using data-driven and model-based approaches. Along the way, Niels has developed new theoretical lenses on agency over land systems, and pioneered a new methodology to analyze drivers of systemic change.

Niels has obtained his PhD degree from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in which he took stock of new actors and new scales in agriculture.  He collaborated with the UNCCD Science-Policy Interface to include dynamics of land tenure and value chain developments in the fight against land degradation.

Originally from Belgium, Niels obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the KU Leuven (Belgium). His master’s thesis took him to the Southwestern Ethiopian forest frontier, where he collected data on rural-to-rural migration, indigenous land management, and the implications for the maintenance of forest ecosystem. He developed a spatial agent-based model to with the obtained data.

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