Alex De Pinto is a Senior Research Fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). He is an environmental and natural resource economist with 25 years of professional experience working in economically-depressed areas. His research focuses on land use management and economic spatial analysis and uses a series of modeling techniques that make it possible to simulate location specific effects of policy changes and their consequent environmental effects. Mr. De Pinto is currently leading research projects on climate smart agriculture and the nexus land use change and GHG emissions in Latin America, South and South East Asia. He received his PhD in Agricultural and Consumer Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he specialized in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics.