Rate My Professor Eugenio Arima

Eugenio Arima is an Associate Professor of Social Science in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has served since 2011. Born in a small town in São Paulo, Brazil, and raised in Brasília, he earned his degree in Agronomy from the University of Brasília. He then moved to Belém at the mouth of the Amazon River, becoming engaged in research on the Amazonian ecosystem and its people under the guidance of tropical ecologist Prof. Christopher Uhl at the Imazon research institute. During this period, he collaborated with World Bank economists on environmental policy impact analyses in Brazil. Arima pursued a master's degree in agricultural economics at Penn State University and a PhD in geography at Michigan State University under the supervision of Prof. Robert Walker. Following his graduate studies, he taught for four years in the Environmental Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, before joining the University of Texas at Austin.

Arima's research focuses on human-environment interactions, land change science, biodiversity conservation, GIScience, applied quantitative methods, Latin America, and organized crime groups and criminal governance. As a human-environmental geographer, he investigates the motivations driving humans to transform tropical landscapes and the resulting spatial patterns, drawing on behavioral theory and political economy. His methodological toolkit includes interview-based fieldwork, computer simulation, econometrics, spatial statistics, geographic information systems, and remote sensing, contributing to public policies on people, the environment, and sustainable development. Key publications include 'Damming the rivers of the Amazon basin' (Nature, 2017), 'Statistical confirmation of indirect land use change in the Brazilian Amazon' (Environmental Research Letters, 2011), 'Public policies can reduce tropical deforestation: lessons and challenges from Brazil' (Land Use Policy, 2014), 'Discipline and develop: destruction of the Brazil nut forest in the lower Amazon basin' (Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019), and recent works such as 'Evaluating the Use of Humanitarian Parole as a Border Management Strategy in the United States' (Migration and Diversity, 2024) and 'Texas water markets: Understanding their trends, drivers, and future potential' (Ecological Economics, 2024). His scholarship informs understandings of deforestation dynamics, land use policies, and environmental governance in tropical regions.