Dr Jacob Phelps
Senior Lecturer in Tropical Environmental Change and PolicyResearch Overview
Jacob is an environmental social scientist dedicated to identifying strategies to protect tropical biodiversity. He leads the , which explores institutional, policy and legal responses to leading environmental challenges, such as illegal wildlife trade and wildfire. He draws on a wide range of methods and approaches, and is active in the science-policy interface, including through CITES and IUCN. Jacob has worked in the Neotropics and across Southeast Asia. Until August 2015, he was a Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia.
Research Interests
Jacob's current research addresses the governance of key environmental challenges:
- Governing biodiversity loss through conservation litigation. Jacob lead the Defra-funded researching the design of environmental lawsuits as a strategy for governing issues such as illegal wildlife trade and deforestation. This work draws on conservation, geography, economics, law and activism. it is being levered to support a lawsuit in Indonesia that will be the first case of its kind globally.
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Governing illegal wildlife trade: Jacob has ongoing resaerch on the diverse interventions used to govern wildlife resources, and especially efforts to reduce illegal wildlife trade. This broad-ranging work includes interviews with people arrested for wildlife crimes in Nepal; assessments of the sustianability of aquarium fish trade in the Philippines, and market-surveys of illegal orchid trade in Southeast Asia. He has a particular interest in wildlife farming, in which threatened species might be farmed to support conservation while providing a legal and sustainable source of wildlife for consumers.
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Governing hydropower through EIAs. Nepal is developing >700 hydropower projects, decisions about which are primarily governed via Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). However, it is an “open secret” that EIAs are rarely implemented with negative socio-environmental outcomes. Funded by the British Council, Jacob and Greenhood Nepal are exploring the EIA governance.
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Governing Indonesian peatland wildfires. Indonesia is suffering fromincreasingly frequent, uncontrolled mega-fire events that yield profound social, environmental and economic burdens. Jacob collaborates in ongoing work on the governance of policy responses to wildlife fires. This includes a current review of the institutional design of 60 different interventions to address wildfires across Indonesia. Jacob and his colalborators are also evaluating the outcomes of a fire prevention programme that has been implemented across 10 villages in Indonesia, to explore how bundles of interventions shape fire outcomes.
PhD Supervision Interests
? Conservation rule breaking ? Governance of wildlife trade and illegal resource access ? Conservation law and criminology ? Social and policy dimensions of Indonesian peatland fires and haze ? How ecosystem service concepts/valuation are understood and used by policy makers, prosecutors and judges
01/07/2023 → 30/06/2026
Research
01/04/2022 → 30/04/2023
Research
31/12/2020 → 30/12/2022
Research
01/10/2020 → 31/12/2022
Research
15/12/2019 → 15/12/2021
Research
01/10/2018 → 31/03/2021
Research
Centre for Crime, Law and Justice
- Political Ecology