Sonya Dewi is a Principal Landscape Ecologist and current CIFOR-ICRAF’s Director of Asia based in Bogor, Indonesia. During her more than 25-year professional career as a scientist, she has focused on understanding the trade-offs and integration between conservation and development agendas at the landscape level across different contexts and on identifying options to change the trajectories in several countries, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Brazil. She has embraced climate change mitigation issues into landscape governance, including developing and analyzing national and subnational level carbon accounting and monitoring, peatland restoration and management strategy, and the carbon footprint of oil palm production. She has been actively promoting integrated and inclusive spatial land-use planning in rural areas for low-carbon development and multiple ecosystem services through the development of a negotiation support tool, which has been adopted widely in Indonesia and also introduced to some other tropical countries such as Viet Nam, Peru and Cameroon. These tools have been used in developing Green Growth Master Plans in a handful of provinces in Indonesia as a roadmap for public-private-people partnerships and policy mainstreaming in achieving Sustainable Development Goals. She strives for evidence-based interventions and solutions to increase economic and climate-resilience livelihoods and food security for poor and vulnerable groups, particularly women and girls, across diverse climatic conditions in Indonesia. One of the most important measures she addresses is strengthening the capacity of smallholder farmers to practice climate-smart agriculture, such as agroforestry, and to access the market.
