He spent two years as postdoc fellow at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (seconded to MPI for Meteorology in Hamburg) working on forestry, carbon cycling modeling, and climate policy. During this two-year research, he successfully developed a forest management model for estimating carbon emissions and stock change under various management, climate policy, and land use change options in Southeast Asia. This work had been specifically listed on the homepage of the United Nations Development Program.
In 2004, he accepted an Associate Professor position at the newly established Graduate School of Applied Informatics, the University of Hyogo (a public university in Japan), where he has taught natural environmental informatics, environmental business, and environmental modeling to graduate students since 2004. He has also supervised the graduate research of five master and three doctoral students whose research themes range from climate policy, forest management to bioenergy policy. He was a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University between September 2008 and August 2009.
His interdisciplinary research has focused upon the estimates of carbon emissions from land use change and forest management. At Harvard University, his research on REDD, compensated reductions, and effective climate policy design built upon this topic. Four peer-reviewed papers on carbon sequestration and Kyoto Protocol, woody bioenergy, and ongoing climate policy debates were published in Forestry, Applied Energy, and Conservation Letters, respectively. His paper on carbon payments for managing tropical forests has been accepted by Environmental Science and Policy. Few more papers are under reviews.
He has established strong research networks through workshop organizing, collaborative interdisciplinary research projects, and wide-ranging personal contacts in developing and developed countries. Additional to having served as a reviewer for many international journals, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and 2006 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, he is an author of many scientific articles. He has further won four awards for academic excellence and outstanding publications.
His main research interests include forest management and international climate policy, REDD+, wood bioenergy, and applications of information technology in environmental conservation.
Selected Journal Papers
Sasaki, N. and Yoshimoto, A. (2010) Benefits of Tropical Forest Management under the New Climate Change Agreement—A Case Study in Cambodia. Environmental Science and Policy (in press), DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2010.04.007
Etoh, H and Sasaki, N. (2010) Comparison on promotion policies for utilization of woody biomass between European countries and Japan.. Japanese Forestry Journal 92(2) (in press)
Sasaki, N. and Putz, F.E. (2009) Critical need for new definitions of forest and forest degradation in global climate change agreements. Conservation Letters 2, 226–232
Sasaki, N., Knorr, W., Foster, D.R., Ninomiya, H., Etoh, H., Chay, S., Kim, S., Sun, S. (2009) Woody biomass and bioenergy potentials in Southeast Asia between 1990 and 2020. Applied Energy 86 (S1), S140-S150
Sasaki, N. and Kim, S. (2009) Biomass carbon sinks in Japanese forests: 1966–2012. Forestry: 82(1),113-123
Kim, S., Sasaki, N., and Koike (2008) Assessment of non-timber forest products in Phnom Kok community forest, Cambodia. Asia Europe Journal 6 (2), 345-354
Sasaki, N. (2006) Carbon emissions due to land-use change and logging in Cambodia- a modeling approach. Journal of Forest Research 11, 397-403
Kim, S., Kim Phat, N., Koike, M., Hayashi H. (2006) Estimating actual and potential government revenues from timber harvesting in Cambodia. Forest Policy and Economics 8, 625- 635
Kim Phat, N., Knorr, W. and Kim S., (2004) Appropriate measures for conservation of terrestrial carbon stocks – analysis of trends of forest management in Southeast Asia. Forest Ecology and Management 191, 283-299