Name：              KOH, Niak Sian
Period：             November 7, 2023 – January 6, 2024
Affiliation：        Postdoctoral researcher, Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University
Research Topic：Forests, Finance, and People: A telecoupling analysis of forestry and agro-timber plantations

Dr. Niak Sian Koh has a background in sustainability science, with a focus on global environmental governance and biodiversity policies. Her research interests include how biodiversity policies can be designed and implemented for effective and equitable outcomes. She has worked with various cases such as hydropower dams on the Mekong River, conservation projects in eastern and southern Africa, biodiversity offsets from six countries, and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

During her stay at RIHN, she collaborates with Professor Grace Wong and members of the FairFrontiers project to examine whether REDD+ finance can lead to transformative forest and land-use decisions in a complex political landscape of competing land uses, interests, and financial flows. The collaborative project uses a telecoupling framework to analyse the flows of finance and commodities, with a case study of Mai-Ndombe in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She looks forward to engaging with other researchers at RIHN.