Ole Mertz is Professor of Geography at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He works on global environmental change, land use transitions and food security in the Global South, with a specific focus on how land use changes at forest-agriculture frontiers affect socio-economic and environmental systems. His regional specialization is Southeast Asia and West Africa, but he has also worked in the Pacific, East and Central Africa and Latin America.

During his stay at RIHN, Ole Mertz will focus on topics such as telecoupled land systems, ecosystem services and well-being with a specific focus on the interlinkages between these, e.g. how well-being variables affect ecosystem service access and vice-versa. He will organize an international seminar around this topic at RIHN, engage with Project Leader, Dr. Grace Wong and the research team working on the FairFrontiers project, and conduct discussions with key Faculty and interested researchers at RIHN regarding linkages to the Global Land Programme and the Land System Science Community. In addition, he will share his extensive experience as an expert reviewer of research proposals with various European funding bodies.