Principal Investigator. Funding: FAPESP (Process 23/10218-5))
Knowledge Co-production for the Juçara Palm Conservation Programme in São Paulo
This project supports and evaluates the Pró-Juçara programme, a public policy run by the Fundação Florestal since 2021 aimed at recovering wild populations of the juçara palm (Euterpe edulis) across protected areas in the state of São Paulo. The programme operates through two main strategies: purchasing seeds from smallholder farmers for restocking strictly protected areas, and making payments for environmental services to encourage planting in territories of traditional communities near sustainable-use conservation units and state parks. The underlying logic is to align conservation goals (removing the species from the endangered list) with economic incentives for keeping the palm standing, by promoting the sustainable harvest of its fruits rather than the destructive extraction of hearts of palm.
The project's research focus is on a critical gap: the market for juçara fruit pulp, one of the main potential product that farmers can commercialise, remains underdeveloped in São Paulo. Farmers face structural, institutional, organisational, and technical barriers to producing, marketing, and adding value to the pulp.
The research aims to generate more robust evidence on these challenges and on the conditions for public investment in agro-industrial processing infrastructure for juçara pulp. It adopts a knowledge co-production approach, actively engaging the full range of stakeholders (such as public managers, extractivists, researchers, and representatives of local cooperatives) to integrate diverse forms of knowledge into the redesign of the policy. The empirical focus is on two territorial contexts where the programme is active: Vale do Ribeira and Vale do Paraíba/Litoral Norte.
Associated Researcher. Funding: FAPESP
Brazil has experienced a marked increase in extreme climate and weather events over recent decades, affecting all biomes and population groups, with the heaviest toll falling on communities in vulnerable areas and indigenous peoples. Extreme rainfall events alone have triggered disasters responsible for thousands of deaths. Losses that could have been prevented through greater societal resilience. This context frames the urgent need to prepare Brazilian society for adaptation and, where necessary, transformative change in the face of the climate crisis.
CLIMARES is a FAPESP Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centre (CEPID) whose mission is to drive innovation for climate adaptation and resilience, with a focus on strategic sectors: food, energy, water, and the economy. It is designed to function as a centre of excellence bringing together leading researchers, policymakers, and sectoral experts to anticipate risks and implement robust resilience measures. The centre's work is organised around eleven thematic axes that interact and reinforce one another: climate change and variability; disaster risk reduction and management; energy transition and technology; food security and hunger reduction; water security and adaptive management; health security and pandemic risk; education and knowledge dissemination; innovation in climate intervention; social transformation in the face of climate change; economic impacts of the climate crisis; and Amazon development and sustainability. The overarching approach is interdisciplinary, connecting natural sciences, social sciences, technology, and public policy to generate both scientific knowledge and actionable solutions for Brazilian society.
Associated Researcher. Funding: Biodiversa+ & CNPq
The BIO-JUST project investigates the environmental justice implications of the design, implementation, and evaluation of Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) for watershed ecosystem services across seven case studies in Europe (Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal) and Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador). It brings together perspectives from environmental justice, political ecology, environmental anthropology, critical institutional analysis, and ecological economics in a multidisciplinary approach, asking which types of NbS generate or reinforce inequalities and conflicts, and which promote socially just outcomes while simultaneously advancing biodiversity conservation and water security.
The project's novelty lies in its integrated qualitative, quantitative, and participatory assessment of the environmental justice implications and conservation impacts of diverse NbS for ecosystem services. The selected sites are located in biodiversity hotspots, in countries at the forefront of NbS implementation, or in areas facing acute water scarcity. While they diverge in terms of institutional setting, managing entity, age, scale, and biophysical context, this variation is precisely what enables the project to deliver robust comparative findings.
Associated Researcher. Funding: CNPq.
The INCT ONSEADAdapta (National Observatory for Water Security and Adaptive Management) is an interdisciplinary network of national and international researchers working on a range of themes connected to its central focus. Water security is a subject that demands deep integration of knowledge and goes beyond interdisciplinarity across multiple axes to pursue an integrated, systemic, and transdisciplinary vision. The INCT aims to bring together these research groups to conduct long-term research at multiple scales, systematise the knowledge produced, train human resources, and inform the formulation of public policy. The initiative is pioneering and significant both for the different regions of Brazil and their particular challenges, and for the country as a whole.
The four foundational pillars of the INCT are: knowledge production and dissemination; science outreach and communication with society; interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity; and science–policy dialogue.
ONSEADAdapta's overarching objective is to become a nationally and internationally recognised reference institution on water security, through experimental, theoretical, and modelling research that integrates diverse tools and fields of knowledge. The focus is on adaptive management, and the institute seeks to bring together academia, public and private enterprises, and society within a triple-helix innovation framework of a socio-technical character.
Associated Researcher. Funding: FAPESP & CNPq.
The INCT-FoRC is focused on the topic of Biotechnology and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity, exploring the intersectionality between plant biodiversity, sustainable food production, biotechnology and human health. The INCT-FoRC will be hosted by the Special Center for Research and Innovation in Food at the University of São Paulo (CEPIx-FoRC), derived from a RIDC/FAPESP, and will work in partnership with other national and international institutions for structured work on three interconnected platforms: 1. Biological and Sustainable Studies of Brazilian Plant Biodiversity, focusing on the identification, characterization and bioactivity of functional compounds in plant species for food purposes; 2) Biotechnological Processes Applied to Food Products and By-products, prioritizing new sustainable technologies and 3) Economic/Socio-environmental Impacts and Education in the Sustainable Use of Biodiversity, for training small producers, environmental assessment of production chains and dissemination of good practices.
The project has a "farm-to-fork-to-gut" approach, studying the biosynthesis of bioactive compounds in planta and evaluating the biotechnological processes applicable to obtaining food products and by-products and the effects on human health, through pre-clinical and clinical studies. The INCT-FoRC will promote social inclusion and sustainability, training producers and promoting circular economy practices, and the transfer of knowledge and technology through strategic partnerships, scientific publications and educational actions. Training specialized human resources is also one of the objectives. The global aim is to contribute to human health, the valorization of biodiversity and the strengthening of national production chains in a sustainable manner, aligning with several UN SDGs, specifically SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 17..