Rachel is the Tyndall Associate Professor in Climate Change and Global Development at the University of East Anglia, UK. Rachel pursues conservation research engaging with an interdisciplinary set of collaborators, scales of analysis, analytical lenses and methods – from earth observation to ethnography – in order to explore the changing relationships between people and place in forest landscapes. She is particularly interested in the social equity and justice of environmental change and its governance and has approached this through the tropical wildfire complex – exploring how landscape flammability impacts people and nature through interwoven feedbacks, interactions and interdependencies. She is also working to explore the ways in which the plural values of nature can be embedded in policy decisions, conducting nature futures work, and has brought together diverse sets of disciplinary thinking to develop a new model of conservation (Connected Conservation) that better addresses the disproportionate role of wealth in the collapse of environmental health, whilst enhancing and empowering the contributions of biocultural centres.

Rachel is Associate Editor for People and Nature and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation. She Chairs the Forests, Fires and Peoples working group hosted by FLARE, is Chapter Lead for the IUFRO Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP) on Forests for Social and Economic Resilience, and is part of the Scientific Committee for the Forests and Livelihoods network (FLARE). Rachel co-leads the Achieving well-being with Climate Action research theme within the Tyndall Centre, is a member of the Global Environmental Justice Research group at the UEA.

Before joining UEA, Rachel held a Frank Jackson Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge with Wolfson College, the Conservation Research Institute (UCCRI) and the Department of Geography, prior to which she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia over 6 years. She holds a PhD from Lancaster Environment Center at Lancaster University which was based in the Brazilian Amazon where she lived for 3 years. Her original training was in Ecology (BSc Hons).