A Better Future for the Planet Earth

I was born in Brussels in 1962. When I was about 10 years old, my family moved to the countryside, outside Brussels. I had a happy childhood. I lived next to a large forest and I was spending my weekends outdoors exploring the landscape and nature.

I started to ride horses when I was 10. We have always had horses at home since. I spent a lot of time taking care of horses, riding and hiking out in the woods. At home, I read a lot of books, mostly novels and philosophy and poetry books. I still like to explore international literature as it is a great way to travel through the books by discovering great authors from different parts of the world. I also played clarinet and saxophone, mostly jazz music. My father was a university professor specialized in strategic management and marketing. My mother was a historian and a teacher. I have been fortunate to be raised in a family that was intellectually curious and open to the world, and to be born in a privileged country where I was able to study what I wanted.

Throughout high school I was not a very motivated student. At that time, no one would have guessed that I would later become a scientist. I never liked to be told what I should do. In fact, thinking independently is an important quality for a researcher because you always have to question dogma and common understanding.

I did a major in geographical science and a minor in philosophy. I just couldn’t choose between these two, so I thought I would give it a try to do both. It was very interesting to explore these different disciplines in parallel. Studying philosophy surely helped me to develop analytical and critical skills and to acquire a broader perspective in my research. This education helped me to reflect on the role of science and policies on society, especially as it relates to sustainability.

For my PhD research, I acquired and analysed Landsat data and went to Burkina Faso to conduct fieldwork. I bought a motorbike, carried a small tent and I travelled for two to three months in a row, roaming across the Sahelian landscape.
Fieldwork is an important component of my research to relate what you see on satellite images to what you see on the ground.

Over the years, the integration of satellite images with socio-economic data became more sophisticated. On the one hand, I started to have access to longer time series of satellite data that revealed how landscapes were changing over several decades. On the other hand, the GPS technology made it possible to locate every interviewed actor very precisely in the landscape.

In 1987, I presented my work as a young PhD student at an international conference in Abidjan, Cote d´Ivoire. After the conference I went to the airport to take my plane back to Belgium and saw Professor Alan Strahler waiting for his plane. He was a renowned expert in analysing satellite data. I approached him and we started to chat about our research. He then invited me to present my work to his department at Boston University. After I gave a seminar there, they offered me a faculty position and I was hired as an assistant professor. I worked for a couple of years in Alan Strahler’s team to refine methods to measure changes in land surface properties, such as vegetation activity and surface moisture, using time series of satellite data. Working with mentors is a good way to acquire new research skills while building your scientific personality.

After a few years working at the Joint Research Centre in Italy where I learned yet new skills, I have been leading a research team at the University of Louvain since 1995. We have continued researching the causes and impacts of land-use changes by linking socio-economic data with Earth observation satellite data. I worked all over the world, from the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan to the Amazon rainforest and the savannahs of the Serengeti and Masai Mara in East Africa. In 2010, I started to split my time between University of Louvain and Stanford University, in California. A periodic change in academic environment is a great way to get re-energised, develop new collaborations and generate new ideas.

A few developing countries such as Vietnam, Bhutan and Costa Rica have shifted in the recent decades from net deforestation to net reforestation, something we refer to as forest transitions. As we systematically analysed data from each of these countries to understand the factors associated with a reversal of deforestation, we found out something unexpected. All of these countries that protected their own forests had at the same time increased their imports of timber and agricultural products from other countries. In other words, they were offshoring their deforestation. This discovery shed light on the fact that sound land use policies in a few countries are not sufficient to reduce global deforestation; we must also elucidate the link between economic globalization and land use.

Currently, I am mostly interested in the upscaling of solutions for sustainable land use. Over the last few years, I have worked a lot on the effectiveness of public policies to promote more sustainable land use, as well as on the private governance of land use, such as through eco-certification systems. Some large private companies have recently committed to make their supply chains more sustainable and deforestation-free.
However, the level of uptake of these solutions remains low. To resolve the crises of deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change, we need more actors to adopt these solutions to upscale them. I am very fortunate to work with a great team of postdoctoral and PhD students to continue to explore solutions to these complex problems.

In 2009, I published a book titled An Ecology of Happiness. It analyses how nature is contributing to our happiness. There is a growing body of literature in psychology, sociology and geography that provides solid empirical evidence on nature’s contribution to human well-being. One of the first studies showed that, if you are in a hospital room with a view on nature, you recover faster, require fewer painkillers and improve your general well-being compared to patients in a room with a view on a brick wall or parking lot. This kind of evidence has been replicated in many different situations. Humans were hunters and gatherers before being urban societies. One hypothesis, formulated by Professor E.O. Wilson and known as biophilia, is that we still carry a heritage from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which explains our innate affinity with nature. Going into a forest, a savannah or into a beautiful natural environment is almost like going home for us. I wrote this book because I was a bit frustrated with some discourses focused exclusively on the need to make sacrifices for the sake of sustainability, to avoid a major catastrophe. While this discourse may work well with a small fraction of the population, many people have different motivations. In this book, I was developing the argument that we should adopt more sustainable behaviours because it has immediate benefits for our well-being, health and security; in short, it´s good for our happiness.

The first readers of my books are my wife and my two daughters. My daughters are working in fields related to sustainability, one on the circular economy and the other one on international human rights. They always give me frank and good advices. My wife comes from the business world, and therefore has a more pragmatic perspective, with a great intuition.