Jonathan Sullivan

I am a sustainability scientist studying global environmental change and inequality. My research focuses on the human, climatic, and political drivers that generate inequality in multiple forms and how inequality in turn affects our environment. This research topic is expressed through the study of land grabs that are redefining land control globally and where I study their influence on local land inequality, agricultural production, and well-being. My research also focuses on flooding, the environmental hazard that affects the most people, where I emphasize the generation of observational flood maps to assess the relationship between flooding and inequality. I principally rely on statistical causal inference methods to connect human-environment impacts to outcomes of inequality, well-being and land-use change. In addition, I use satellite imagery from regional to global scales to monitor agricultural systems and flood events.

Recent Publications

Tellman, B., Sullivan, J. A., Kuhn, C., Kettner, A. J., Doyle, C. S., Brakenridge, G. R., Erickson, T. A., & Slayback, D. A. (2021). Satellite imaging reveals increased proportion of population exposed to floods. Nature, August 2020. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03695-w

Liao, C., Nolte, K., Sullivan, J.A., Brown, D.G., Lay, J., Althoff, C., Agrawal, A., 2020. Carbon emissions from the global land rush and their potential mitigation. Nat. Food 2, 15–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-00215-3

Hawker L., Neal J., Tellman B., Liang J., Schumann G., Doyle C., Sullivan J.A., Savage J., Tshimanga R. 2020. Comparing earth observation and inundation models to map flood hazards. Environ. Res. Letters https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abc216