Petterson is a PhD candidate at LSE working with land use and the environment. He currently teaches at the Methodology Institute and Department of Geography, LSE.

In his thesis, submitted to the Department of International Development in September 2014, he studies indirect land use change in the Brazilian Amazon, and the relation between deforestation and welfare. He developed a new approach to survey data collection that allowed him to generate spatially explicit representative household data for cattle ranchers in the Amazon at a lower cost and higher speed than usual.

Previously, he has worked in Brazil on climate change economics. He has served as a co-author to the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change.

Research interests

• land use intensification
• livestock production
• welfare and the environment
• economic development in agricultural frontiers
• ethics of climate change.