Tracing Forest Risk along Commodity Chains (TRACC) 

Dr. Juliet Lu (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the School for Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Department of Forest Resources Management at the University of British Columbia. She is a political ecologist focused on the implications of China’s growing investments in land and other resources in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Dr. Sophia Carodenuto (she/her) leads the Environmental Governance Group and serves as Director of UVic’s Global Development Studies program. A political geographer, her research demonstrates how land and forest resources are embedded in sustainability and equity processes at multiple scales, with a particular focus on global to local interactions. Her work on global food systems and supply chains sits at the intersection of public policy, corporate accountability, and environmental justice. She brings these themes into the classroom, most notably through the Agroecology Field School in Belize, where students engage directly with the social, ecological, and political dimensions of food systems. Before joining UVic, she was a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) and a Visiting Scholar at Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 2012 to 2016, she was based in Cameroon, where she established and managed a regional hub for UNIQUE land use covering Central and West Africa.

Dr. Eric Mensah Kumeh (he/him) is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Department of Forest Resources Management and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia. His work sits at the intersection of critical agroforestry, political ecology, and land-use governance, with a long empirical focus on cocoa and tree-crop systems and the smallholders who sustain them across sub-Saharan Africa. A former development practitioner, he combines field experience with decolonial scholarship to ask how global sustainability rules — like the EUDR — reshape rural livelihoods.

Dr. Sarah Gergel (she/her) is a Professor in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Her research areas include: Mapping and Quantifying Ecosystem Services; Social-ecological Landscapes and Resilience Historical Dynamics of Large River-floodplains; Mapping & Monitoring with First Nations and LEK and High-Resolution Image Analysis (satellite imagery and historical aerial photographs)

Thao Nguyen (he/him) is an MSc student in the Faculty of Forestry at UBC and will be entering his PhD in September 2026. He is a social science researcher working at the nexus of the environment and human livelihoods, specifically focusing on the impacts of various sustainability initiatives on commodity chains and forest-dependent local communities in the Mekong region. His theoretical approach draws insights from sustainable livelihoods, political ecology, as well as human and environmental geographies. His research methodologies are primarily qualitative, relying on ethnographic fieldwork, and his research so far has been made possible in part through collaboration with local organizations, including the Centre for Development and Environment based in Laos.

Khin Htet Htet Pyone (she/her) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. Originally from Myanmar (Burma), she is an interdisciplinary scholar with a diverse background in geospatial analysis and community-based research. Her current research explores agricultural expansion at different scales and its interconnected impacts on deforestation within Southeast Asian landscapes, using approaches from political ecology and spatial data analysis. Prior to her PhD, Htet Htet worked with local and international NGOs, research institutes, and consulting firms, focusing on forest and land governance initiatives across Myanmar and Mainland Southeast Asia. Most recently, she worked as a Graduate Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, where she conducted land-use mapping to detect agricultural transitions and community conservation areas in Myanmar.