David Gaveau, PhD

 David is the founder and managing director of TheTreeMap. He has twenty years’ work experience in forest conservation and climate change research. He conducts scientific studies and builds monitoring systems that inform policies, decision-making, and public opinion about the causes and consequences of tropical deforestation and forest fires. He verifies the legality of deforestation, helps buyers of commodities source responsibly, and evaluates the effectiveness of environmental policies. He has extensive field experience in Indonesian protected areas, helped establish the deforestation baselines of WCS’s Wildlife Sanctuary REDD project in Cambodia, and played a critical role in several high-profile forest conservation campaigns led by Greenpeace. He published over 60 scientific papers (h-index 40, citations: 7,172) in high-impact conservation journals on topics ranging from causes and consequences of deforestation and fires to protected area effectiveness evaluations. He frequently engages in popular media to ensure his scientific findings are translated into a language the public and policymakers can access. He writes in The Conversation and has appeared on television shows. His work has generated many media stories, published in Newsweek, Science Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Nasdaq, Reuters, and other publications that reached several million people. David has a broad research network and collaborative partnerships with NGOs and conservation scientists in Southeast Asia, the US, and Europe. He is a Senior Fellow at Sunway University, Malaysia, where he teaches post-graduate students about data Science to advance sustainability, and was a member of the IUCN Oil Palm Working Group.