Christopher Martius

FTA Management Team Member, Flagship 5 Leader, CIFOR

Christopher Martius has been principal scientist in climate change at CIFOR since April 2013. He holds a PhD in Biology from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and is also a lecturer in agroecology at the University of Bonn. He was a senior fellow at the Center for Development Research (ZEF) in Bonn, Germany, and visiting professor at the Indo-German Center for Sustainability (IGCS) in Chennai, India, from 2012-2013. Prior to that, he was assistant director for science programs at the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) in Brazil from 2009-2011. He acted as head of the CGIAR/International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) Program for Central Asia and the Caucasus in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, from 2008-2009, which won the “CGIAR King Baudouin Award for Outstanding Partnership” in 2008. Previously, he was a senior scientist at ZEF Bonn, where he supervised 30 PhD students, from 1998-2007. He is a cofounder and Advisory Board Member of DesertNet International, a network of scientists dealing with drylands, land degradation and desertification. Christopher coordinated an international, interdisciplinary project on land and water resource management in Uzbekistan, and has over 20 years of work experience in tropical ecology (Brazilian Amazonia, Africa) and in drylands. He worked for many years on conservation agriculture, soil ecology and organic matter in tropical and dryland soils.