Sonya Dewi

Sonya Dewi is the ICRAF country programme coordinator of Indonesia and is a Senior Landscape Ecologist. She is based in Southeast Asia Regional office of ICRAF in Bogor. Sonya received her Ph.D. in Theoretical Ecology from the Australian National University in 1997. During her more than twenty years of professional career as a researcher, she focuses on understanding of the trade-offs and integration between conservation and development agendas at the landscape level across different contexts, and on identifying options to change the trajectories in several countries, such as Indonesia, India and Brazil. Land science has continuously been the bases of her multi-disciplinary research. In particular, she has used spatial analysis to develop empirical models and tools and derive and analyze time series of remote sensing data. For more than ten years, she has embraced climate change mitigation issues into landscape governance, particularly in the development and analysis of national and sub-national level carbon accounting and monitoring, peatland strategy, carbon footprint of palm oil production, national level REDD+ strategy.

More recently she has been actively promoting integrated and inclusive spatial land use planning in rural areas for low-emission development and for multiple environmental services through the development of a negotiation support tool, which has been adopted widely in Indonesia and also introduced to some other tropical countries such as Vietnam, Peru and Cameroon. The proof of concepts and proof of applications through facilitation, policy engagement capacity strengthening programs in several districts and provinces in Indonesia have been established. The tools have been used in developing Green Growth Plan for one particular province in Indonesia as a roadmap for public-private-people partnerships in achieving Sustainable Goals. Along the line, she promotes partnerships in restoration as an inherent part of sustainable landscape governance through the application and adoption of ROAM (Restoration Opportunity Assessment Method) developed by IUCN in two degraded Sumatran watersheds. She has been managing a handful of big projects funded by a range of donors such as EU, DANIDA.