About

Eric Lambin is a geographer and environmental scientist who holds the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professorship and is a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. He divides his time between UCLouvain in Belgium and Stanford, where he is part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. His research focuses on understanding the causes and impacts of land use changes across different parts of the world. Lambin has led significant international scientific projects, including serving as Chair of the Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC) project from 1999 to 2005. Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards, including the 2009 Francqui Prize, the 2014 Volvo Environment Prize, and the 2019 Blue Planet Prize. He is an International Fellow at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a member of four European Academies of Science. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission. Lambin holds a PhD in Sciences (Geography) from the University of Louvain, Belgium, earned in 1988, along with a master's degree in Geography and a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the same university.

Research topics

• Economics
• Ecology
• Sociology
• Environmental resource management
• Geography
• Social Science
• Environmental planning
• Agroforestry
• Development economics
• Psychology
• Business
• Demography
• Environmental ethics
• Environmental science
• Biology
• Microeconomics
• Social psychology
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental protection
• Forestry
• Public economics
• Positive economics

Selected publications

• Pixel time series-based quantification and validation to improve spatiotemporal analysis of land cover data

  International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation · 2026-03-19

  articleOpen access

  • Map errors in land cover time series manifest as Switching and Multi-transitions. • Post-Classification Comparison (PCC) cannot detect Switching and Multi-transitions. • Pixel Time Series (PTS) can isolate potential errors from these trajectories. • Error propagation amplified through PCC can be prevented through PTS. • Wider adoption of PTS needed to better analyse and validate land cover time series. As land cover data continue to be produced at higher resolutions and over longer time series, methods of quantifying land change that can account for potential errors from misclassification are increasingly needed. Using a case study of 30-m annual forest change across 3,937,655 km 2 of Southeast Asia, we compared analytical outcomes from two techniques: Post-Classification Comparison (PCC), the pairwise differencing of land cover maps, and Pixel Time Series (PTS), wherein the entire collection of transitions across a time series is simultaneously assessed. We found that PTS isolated two time series phenomena—switching (oscillations between two land cover classes) and multi-transitions (≥ 2 transitions over ≥ 3 classes)—of which 92.3% were erroneous. By contrast, those errors remained undetected through PCC and were instead directly propagated into analysis, leading to considerable overestimation of gross and net forest change. Thus, incorporation of PTS will readily benefit a variety of higher-order spatial applications, including within the Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) domain. A paradigm shift away from PCC towards a PTS-based mode of geographical analysis is needed to more accurately leverage the increasingly dense spatiotemporal information provided from new land cover time series databases.

  PublisherDOI

• Mismatch between where solar projects are proposed and approved: the case of PV acceptance in the French Alps

  Energy Policy · 2026-01-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Economic benefits of small-scale irrigation are associated with prevalence of irrigation nearby

  Environmental Research Communications · 2025-10-07

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Small-scale irrigation can significantly increase household agricultural revenues. We explore the extent to which these earnings vary based on the share of farmers irrigating nearby. Using primary data collected from 985 smallholder farmers in rural Ethiopia, we demonstrate that irrigating in villages with high irrigation prevalence is associated with greater agricultural revenues and more commercialization opportunities, particularly in the dry season. The revenue gains associated with high-prevalence irrigators largely accrue to those who use mechanized irrigation technologies. Supporting low-prevalence irrigators with policies that improve market access can greatly amplify their ability to generate financial returns.

  PublisherDOI

• « Les recherches en géo-ingénierie doivent inclure les impacts écologiques et sociaux »

  Pour la Science · 2025-09-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disturbance and disease

  One Earth · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Land conflicts from overlapping claims in Brazil’s rural environmental registry

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-08-07 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Satellite-based land use monitoring and farm-level traceability offer opportunities for targeted zero-deforestation interventions on private lands. Brazil's Rural Environmental Registry (Cadastro Ambiental Rural, or "CAR"), a land cadaster based on self-declaration of property boundaries, was created to monitor compliance with national forest laws. It has become an important enabling measure for sustainable supply chain initiatives like the Amazon Soy Moratorium. However, CAR enrollment is increasingly used to bolster illegal land claims, putting it at the heart of land grabbing dynamics. Self-declaration of properties in the CAR offers a unique situation to study land conflicts and their impact on land use decisions on a large scale. We quantified competing land claims among 846,420 registrations in the Brazilian Legal Amazon and applied a series of generalized linear mixed-effects models. We determined that CAR overlaps are more prevalent on larger registrations, in more densely settled areas, and in areas with less secure land tenure. We tested how landholders respond to land conflicts, finding significantly more deforestation and declared legal forest reserve on lands with multiple claims. CAR overlap results in an overestimation of forest reserves by up to 9.7 million hectares when considering double-counted and deforested areas of reserves, highlighting an overlooked form of Forest Code noncompliance. While the CAR continues to be used as evidence of land tenure, we conclude that the formalization of land claims through self-declarations is inadequate to decrease conflicts. CAR overlap information provides objective evidence of land conflict that authorities can leverage with field inspection to ensure peaceful occupation before issuing land titles.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How poverty is measured impacts who gets classified as impoverished

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-02-05 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  We test whether the classification of households into poverty categories is meaningfully influenced by the poverty measurement approach that is employed. These classification techniques are widely used by governments, non-profit organizations, and development agencies for policy design and implementation. Using primary data collected in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda, we find almost no agreement in how four commonly used approaches rank 16,150 households in terms of poverty status. This result holds for each country, for urban and rural households, and across the entire socio-economic distribution. Households' poverty rankings differ by an entire quartile on average. Conclusions about progress toward poverty alleviation goals may depend in large part on how poverty is measured.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Oil palm expansion and deforestation in Southwest Cameroon associated with proliferation of informal mills

  2024-11-12 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Oil palm expansion resulted in 2 million hectares (Mha) of forest loss globally in 2000–2010. Despite accounting for 24% (4.5 Mha) of the world’s total oil palm cultivated area, expansion dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa have been overlooked. We show that in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region of Africa, 67% of oil palm expansion from 2000–2015 occurred at the expense of forest. Contrary to the publicized narrative of industrial-scale expansion, most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation is occurring outside large agro-industrial concessions. Expansion and deforestation carried out by non-industrial producers is occurring near low-efficiency informal mills, unconstrained by the location of high-efficiency company-owned mills. These results highlight the key role of a booming informal economic sector in driving rapid land use change. High per capita consumption and rising palm oil demands in sub-Saharan Africa spotlight the need to consider informal economies when identifying regionally relevant sustainability pathways.

• Interventions to control forest loss in a swidden cultivation landscape in Nan Province, Thailand

  Regional Environmental Change · 2024-08-15 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Land system governance shapes tick-related public and animal health risks

  Journal of Land Use Science · 2024-04-09 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access

  Land cover and land use have established effects on hazard and exposure to vector-borne diseases. While our understanding of the proximate and distant causes and consequences of land use decisions has evolved, the focus on the proximate effects of landscape on disease ecology remains dominant. We argue that land use governance, viewed through a land system lens, affects tick-borne disease risk. Governance affects land use trajectories and potentially shapes landscapes favourable to ticks or increases contact with ticks by structuring human-land interactions. We illustrate the role of land use legacies, trade-offs in land-use decisions, and social inequities in access to land resources, information and decision-making, with three cases: Kyasanur Forest disease in India, Lyme disease in the Outer Hebrides (Scotland), and tick acaricide resistance in cattle in Ecuador. Land use governance is key to managing the risk of tick-borne diseases, by affecting the hazard and exposure. We propose that land use governance should consider unintended consequences on infectious disease risk.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Patrick Meyfroidt

  UCLouvain

  91 shared

• Daniel J. Salkeld

  Colorado State University

  44 shared

• B. L. Turner

  43 shared

• Rodolfo Dirzo

  Stanford University

  41 shared

• Kristofer M. Helgen

  Australian Museum

  40 shared

• Douglas J. McCauley

  39 shared

• Hillary S. Young

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  39 shared

• Lynne Gaffikin

  Center for Innovation

  36 shared

Awards & honors

• 2009 Francqui Prize
• 2014 Volvo Environment Prize
• 2019 Blue Planet Prize
• International Fellow at the U.S. National Academy of Science…
• Member of four Academies of Science in Europe