Marieke Sassen

Marieke’s work focuses on trade-offs and synergies between agriculture and biodiversity and issues related to land use planning. She is also involved in a project looking at biodiversity and commodities at landscape and regional scale.
Marieke obtained her MSc in Tropical Natural Resource Management in Wageningen, the Netherlands. Prior to joining UNEP-WCMC she spent 4 years in Kenya and Uganda working towards her PhD on forest cover change and the outcomes of competing claims on forest for conservation and local livelihoods. Before that, she worked for the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Cameroon and Gabon, heading multidisciplinary teams in ecological field surveys and assessments of local people’s perspectives on biodiversity and conservation. She enjoys working on projects that address the challenge of reconciling nature conservation and agricultural development in the tropics. Her experience taught her that such questions can only be resolved by including local perspectives and using interdisciplinary approaches. Marieke is Dutch but was born in Tanzania and grew up in various other places, though mainly in Côte d’Ivoire. Away from work Marieke enjoys running, yoga, horse-riding, sailing, dinners with friends and exploring the beautiful places of the world.