Helmut GeistHelmut Geist is professor of human-environment interactions at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. From 2000 until 2005 he was executive director of the IGBP-IHDP Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC) project at LUCC's InternationalProject Office at the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. His research interests include political ecology, sustainable land use, land-change theory, and human-driven environmental changes such as land degradation, deforestation, desertification, and urbanization. Based at universities the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, and the United States, he was in involved in the World Bank's Human Development Network on tobacco control (1998), in reviews of the European Commission's desertification research (2003), and in the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2004). Read More Read Less