Gideon Baffoe is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environment and Development at the Department of Environment and Geography. He is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC). Gideon is an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in development and sustainability studies. His research experience has centred on socio-economic and ecological systems resilience. He aims to understand and contribute to the processes that enhance the development and sustainability of socioecological and economic systems. He has analysed, for instance, how socio-cultural and natural environments interact and shape livelihood systems and outcomes in urban and rural landscapes in Africa.

Prior to joining University of York, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Glasgow and United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS, Tokyo). At Glasgow, his work focused on investigating sustainable urban neighbourhoods in fast rising global south cities of Cape Town, Kigali, Dar es Salam, Datong, Manila and Delhi. His work at UNU-IAS was on urban sustainability, where he applied the solution scanning technique to develop a framework to aid the implementation of SDG 9 and 11 in three African countries (Ghana, South Africa and Tanzania).

Gideon has wide research interests, including but not limited to sustainable cities and neighbourhoods, urbanization, poverty and inequality, livelihood and environmental change, climate change, ecosystem services, agricultural development and food security, and natural resource governance, among others. He has a strong methodological expertise in combining both quantitative and qualitative techniques in socioeconomic and ecological research. His work has been published in leading journals, including Sustainability Science, Ecological Indicators, Cities and Habitat International.