People

Rosa Maria Roman-Cuesta was born in Barcelona. She is a tropical forest ecologist (PhD, 2002) and an Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow since 2007. She runs research on how the land-use sector (forests, wetlands, grasslands, croplands, livestock) can contribute to mitigation and adaptation strategies under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement (NDCs). She is particularly interested in supporting policymakers with data and new methodologies. Her role in JRC, under the Green Deal focuses on the science-policy interface for the new LULUCF regulation. She has worked for 20 years on Nature Based Solutions (NBS) involving tropical ecosystem management and on the monitoring ecosystem services. As a tropical ecologist, Rosa Maria has an interest in landscape restoration and in monitoring ecosystems’ integrity and resilience in front of extreme events, such as hurricanes, El Nino droughts, heat waves and fire. Her research has been funded by a diversity of sources (USAID, World Bank, BNP-PARIBAS) and has kept the focus on NBS: FIMIDTRO (Fire management mitigation practices in the dry tropics) (2019-2021); SEFOCAD (Secondary Forests’ Carbon Dynamics in Peru: Amazon, Andes, and Coastal forests) (2020-2021) and CORESCAM (Coastal and marine biodiversity resilience to extreme events in the Caribbean: implications for regional conservation and policy-making) (2020-2023). She has worked in three continents (America, Africa, South East Asia) being particularly active in Latin America, where she has long worked on connecting forest carbon dynamics with global mitigation action (e.g. UNFCCC-REDD+ mechanism and Voluntary Carbon Markets).