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Short CV

Prof. Dr. Gilberto Câmara is a Brazilian researcher in Geoinformatics, Spatial Analysis, Land Use Change, and Earth Observations, from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). He is internationally recognized for promoting free access for geospatial data and for setting up an efficient satellite monitoring of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

Gilberto was INPE’s assistant director for Earth Observation from October 2001 to December 2005, and INPE’s director general from December 2005 to May 2012. During his term in as INPE’s director general, the institute’s budget grew from US$ 90 million in 2004 to US$ 250 million in 2010. Under his guidance, INPE’s team achieved big advances in land change monitoring using remote sensing, leading to a major decrease in the deforestation in Amazonia. The leading scientific journal Nature called the reduction in deforestation in Amazonia to be "the biggest environmental success story in decades".

Gilberto led the Brazilian team which, working together with researchers from IIASA (International Institute for Applied System Analysis), developed the technical studies that support the land use component of Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreeement on Climate Change.

Gilberto has advised 23 PhD dissertations and 31 Master thesis and published more than 150 scholarly papers that have been cited more than 1100 times (Google Scholar, April 2019). He was a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of Global Land Project from 2006 to 2011. From June 2013 to May 2015, he was the Brazil Chair at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster (Germany) , with support from the Brazilian agency CAPES.

As recognition for his work, he was inducted as Dr. Honoris Causa from the University of Münster (Germany) and as a Chevalier (Knight) of the Ordre National du Mérite of France. He received the Global Citizen Award of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association. He is also a Fellow of the Faculty of Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente (Netherlands) and a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He received the 2012 William T. Pecora Award from USGS and NASA for "leadership to the broad and open access to remote sensing data".

From 2015 to 2018, he represented the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in the Belmont Forum of funding agencies for global change research, and was one of the co-chairs of the Belmont Forum (2016-2017).

He is currently serving as Director of the Secretariat of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), for the period July 2018 to June 2021. As director for GEO Secretariat, he intends to build on his vision on open knowledge to help developing nations to best use Earth observation data for improving societal well-being and sustainable development practices.