Oliver Taherzadeh
Oliver is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Leiden University
After working as a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Oliver Taherzadeh completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge on a Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship, investigating resource insecurity in global supply chains. Following his PhD, he worked in Kyoto as a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, advancing environmental footprint assessment of diets, households, and global food systems.
He teaches the Socio-Economic Policy Evaluation course on the BSc Sustainable Societies programme and lectures on macroeconomic footprinting methods.
Research topic
His current research integrates global food system models with microdata on consumers, farmers, and food companies to assess their roles in sustainable food transitions. He coordinates this work within the Horizon Europe GreenGrocer project, the development of MATILDA (Micro-Macro Assessment Tool to Identify Low-impact Dietary Actions), and actor-level modelling of farming systems.
His work has been featured in the UN FAO 2025 State of Food and Agriculture report, media outlets including The Guardian, The Ecologist, and The Conversation, and journals such as PNAS, Nature Food, Nature Sustainability, Global Environmental Change, and Environmental Research Letters. He has also contributed to expert consultations for UNEP, the OECD, and Defra on applying environmental data to sustainability policy.
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