Lorenzo is currently (July 2025) a Dragon Capital Chair Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (University of Exeter) and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (LSE), where he continues to contribute to the NERC-funded Economics of Biodiversity Additionality (BIOADD) project in various capacities. His current work examines the additionality of overlapping area-based policies in Indonesian forests (Work Package 3). More broadly, his research spans environmental and development economics, with recent projects on the co-benefits and distributional effects of carbon pricing, the impacts of forest payment schemes in the Philippines, and the consequences of EU agricultural set-aside policies for biodiversity and production in the UK.

Lorenzo joined the Grantham Research Institute in 2023 as a Postdoctoral Research Officer after earning his PhD in Environmental Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His dissertation received the EAERE Best Doctoral Dissertation Prize in 2024. He also holds an MSc in Environmental Economics and Climate Change (LSE) and a BA in Economics and Trade (University of Florence). During his PhD, he was a Research Associate at the European University Institute, studying the dynamic and spatial dimensions of structural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has served as a research assistant on projects at the LSE Middle East Centre, the Grantham Research Institute, and the LSE Department of Geography and Environment.

In September 2025, Lorenzo will join IE University (Madrid) as an Assistant Professor of Economics. The DC Chair are pleased for his successful career change, but will be sad to see him go.

Lorenzo’s work combines environmental and development economics, employing applied econometrics, georeferenced data and satellite imagery to causally examine complex interactions between the economy and the biosphere. His research focusses on forests, carbon and biodiversity additionality, and on the interplay between climate mitigation and economic development. He is also interested in issues of environmental justice and distribution, and in the role of polluting industries in shaping environment-development trade-offs. His work has so far been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, PNAS, Environmental and Resource Economics, and Biological Conservation.