Salvador Pueyo

Contact him at: spueyo-at-ub.edu

Short bio

Salvador Pueyo is a scientist and an activist. He has been an activist since he joined the radical green movement being 14.

He started his career at the Dept. of Ecology of the University of Barcelona (of which he is still a member), by combining works of environmental management with a Ph. D. thesis in ecological theory and ecological economics. He has also been a researcher at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon (INPA, Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil), the Dept. of Renewable Resources of the University of Alberta, the Science Park of Barcelona and the Catalan Institute of Climate Sciences.

Initially, his main interest lied in examining the thermodynamic hypotheses in the ecological and ecological economic literatures in light of the physical literature. Soon afterwards he adopted a complexity approach by moving to a statistical physics where the basic units are no longer atoms and molecules but organisms and species or agents and firms, as a way to study somemacro aspects of environmental and economic processes of political significance. Some of the ensuing results in ecology and in climate have been published in journals conventionally classified as high profile, such as Science, Nature Climate Change,Ecology Letters, PNAS or GEB.

Currently, his main focus is on ecological econophysics as one of the foundations of a macroeconomics for degrowth.

Research interests: complex systems, limits to growth, climate change, ecological theory, biodiversity, macroecology, ecological macroeconomics, ecological econophysics, economic alternatives, green policy, degrowth

Selected publications:

Pueyo, S. 2014. Ecological econophysics for degrowth. Sustainability 6: 3431-3483.

Pueyo, S. 2012. Solution to the paradox of climate sensitivity. Climatic Change 113: 163–179.

Fearnside, P.M. & Pueyo, S. 2012. Greenhouse-gas emissions from tropical dams. Nature Climate Change 2: 382–384.

Pueyo, S., Graça, P.M.L.A., Barbosa, R.I., Cots, R., Cardona, E. & Fearnside, P.M. 2010. Testing for criticality in ecosystem dynamics: the case of Amazonian rainforest and savanna fire. Ecology Letters 13: 793–802.

Pueyo, S. 2007. Self-organised criticality and the response of wildland fires to climate change. Climatic Change 82: 131–161.

Pueyo, S., He, F. & Zillio, T. 2007. The maximum entropy formalism and the idiosyncratic theory of biodiversity. Ecology Letters 10: 1017–1028.

Pueyo, S. 2006. Self-similarity in species-area relationship and in species abundance distribution. Oikos 112: 156-162 [Erratain Oikos 115: 582].

Pueyo, S. 2006. Diversity: between neutrality and structure. Oikos 112: 392–405.

Pueyo, S. 2003. Irreversibility and Criticality in the Biosphere. University of Barcelona, 399 p.