Laurent Durieux

Dr Laurent Durieux joined the GEO Secretariat in May 2021 to coordinate GEO engagements to support the sustainable development goals. He is seconded by the French National Institute of Research for Sustainable Research (IRD) where he spent most of his career coordinating research and scientific infrastructure programs dedicated to improve the access of developing countries to EO capacities for sustainable issues. He is a geographer and remote sensing expert specialized in transdisciplinary sustainable science using artificial intelligence applied to big Earth data. He developed innovative methodologies in the field of Geographic-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA). He spent his PHD at the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE) to study the impact of the deforestation in the Amazon on the convective clouds. Since 2007 he was engaged at IRD in the establishment of sustainable development observatories based on direct satellite receiving stations together with remote sensing centres. Complementary to his work Dr Durieux participates to different scientific, indigenous and environmental associations and NGO activities. He was nominated as President of the South-American Association of Remote Sensing from 2012 to 2014. He is nowadays head of the WeForest NGO scientific committee engaged in restoring the world forest landscapes based on transdisciplinary sustainable science knowledge.