The Conservation and Development Lab (CDL) is a research team based at the University of Cambridge. It is chaired and led by Prof Rachael Garrett, who is the Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the University of Cambridge, Department of Geography.
Our work aims to conserve biodiversity and improve the wellbeing of people living in tropical agricultural-forest frontiers.
Our group’s competencies span economics, political science, geography, development studies, and data science. We have unique expertise in the interactions between supply chains, land use decisions, and environmental governance at many scales, which combines intensive fieldwork with regional to global statistical analysis and modelling. Our work has historically focused on the rapid expansion of commodity agriculture and forestry in the tropics, with research projects in the Southern Cone of South America, West Africa and Southeast Asia through partnerships with local agricultural and forestry agencies and existing academic collaborators.
More recently we are focused on how to leverage policy and finance to scale out improved value chains and improved governance for socio-bioeconomies. These are alternative economies focused on innovative models of development that prioritize the well-being of communities while maintaining the health of ecosystem
The goals of our research group include:
- To end tropical deforestation and restore previously cleared areas;
- to foster economic transformations and enhance the value of forests; and
- to improve the wellbeing of rural communities.
To accomplish our diverse research portfolio, we leverage our diverse training in environmental science, economics, geography, anthropology, policy analysis, development studies, and history. Our approach combines multiple inter- and transdisciplinary methods (Figure 1). These different components work together to generate theory, integrate a range of data types, and test and refine theory with novel empirical analyses. This work is accomplished by a diverse, international team of doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers.
