Dr. Louis Verchot is a Principal Scientist and Lead of the Land Restoration Group at the Alliance Bioversity – CIAT, based in Colombia. He has been working throughout the tropics on forestry and agriculture issues with a climate change focus for the past 35 years. His work in Asia focuses on deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, land-use change, peatland degradation, and REDD+, among others. He has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2003, and recently was a lead author on the Special Report on Climate Change and Land.