Javier Godar

Javier Godar was Senior Research Fellow at SEI Headquarters. He worked at SEI from 2012-2024. Javier co-founded the Trase platform and led the development of the SEI-PCS approach that underlies the information provided by Trase.

His primary focus during the last 15 years has been on understanding transitions towards more sustainable land-use systems in the forested tropics, with especial focus in South America. Recent work on this issue has been supported by three different grants from the Swedish Research Council Formas, looking at actor-specific deforestation outcomes in the Amazon, land-base emissions and biodiversity impacts associated to global demand of tropical forest-risk commodities, and land leakage in the soy and beef sectors in South America. The main goal of this research is to increase our understanding of social-ecological systems in tropical forested areas, to better inform rural development and deforestation policies.

Javier also focused on mapping for the Trase platform the flows of globally traded commodities, such as soy, beef or palm oil; the aim is to identify their regions of production and to allocate the impacts generated along the supply chain (e.g. deforestation, biodiversity losses, transportation emissions) to the actors demanding those products downstream (e.g. traders, consumers, investors). Based on the insights provided by this data Javier contributed with research towards understanding mechanisms of agricultural frontier formation, assessing the effects of zero-deforestation commitments and of tropical conservation and rural development policies, and the quantification of emissions in different supply chain steps. These works are supported by the Swedish EPA, Formas and various Trase donors, including the Moore Foundation, the EC and GEF.