ROSA MARIA ROMAN CUESTA

Research Associate

rosamaria.romancuesta@eui.eu

English

Biography

Rosa Maria Roman-Cuesta 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) can contribute to mitigation and adaptation strategies under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. She is particularly interested in offering data evidence to policymakers and focuses on the science-policy interface. 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 latest research has been funded by a diversity of sources (USAID, World Bank, BNP-PARIBAS) and keeps the focus on NBS: FIMIDTRO (Fire management mitigation practices in the dry tropics) (2019-2021); CORESCAM (Coastal and marine biodiversity resilience to extreme events in the Caribbean: implications for regional conservation and policy-making) (2020-2022) or SEFOCAD (Secondary Forests’ Carbon Dynamics in Peru: Amazon, Andes, and Coastal forests) (2020-2021). She has worked in three continents (America, Africa, South East Asia). She has been particularly active in Latin America, where she has long worked on connecting forest carbon sequestration with global carbon markets (e.g. UNFCCC-REDD+ mechanism and Voluntary Carbon Market-VERRA). She is certified on Corporate Carbon Footprints (ISO 14064/67) and her work is now connecting corporate mitigation commitments for 2050 and their need to compensate for emissions through carbon offsets from the land-use sector. At the EUI she collaborates on the DICET project on Voluntary Carbon Markets

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