Maarten Voors appointed Personal Professor

Voors has worked at WUR since 2013. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, where he was affiliated with the Department of Land Economy as an Isaac Newton Trust Post-Doctoral Fellow.

As a development economist, Voors studies how policy can contribute to poverty reduction, with a strong focus on countries in sub-Saharan Africa. His research addresses themes such as health, agriculture, institutions and governance. In recent years, his interest in the intersection between nature conservation and poverty has grown again. “In the coming years, I want to focus explicitly on policies for nature conservation and how these can go hand in hand with poverty reduction,” says Voors.

Voors analyses which economic incentives and policy choices ensure that nature policy also improves people’s living conditions, and when interventions may backfire. “A subsidy or additional income may be intended to reduce deforestation, but it can also lead households to invest in a chainsaw to clear more land.” Understanding these mechanisms, he says, is a core task of his work.

An important example is his long-standing collaboration with the Gola Rainforest Programme in and around a national park in Sierra Leone. He has been involved there for seventeen years in projects financed through carbon credits. Carbon credits are tradable certificates representing a quantity of avoided or sequestered emissions, for example through forest protection. They are used to offset emissions or to meet climate targets. According to Voors, knowledge about such instruments should be brought together more effectively. “With carbon credits, much is possible, but much can also go wrong. It touches on many fields; I would like to see WUR become a knowledge centre on carbon credits.”