Helmut J. Geist
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Helmut J. Geist is a professor and chair of the Human-Environment Interactions department at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom. He was the executive director of the IGBP/IHDP Land-Use/Cover Change (LUCC) at the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium from 2000-2005. His research interests include political ecology, sustainable land use, agriculture and health, urbanization, desertification, the environmental and political effects of tobacco farming, and the overall social dimensions of global environmental change. Based at universities in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, and the United States, he has been 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).
