Arief Wijaya is the Program Director of WRI Indonesia, and focuses on overseeing programmatic works falls under Agriculture, Forest and Landuse (AFOLU) portfolio, as well as Climate, Energy, Cities and the Ocean (CECO) portfolio. His expertise lies around tropical forest landscapes and their impacts on climate change, drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics, low carbon development policies, and national GHG inventory.

Prior to joining WRI, he worked at Thünen Institute of International Forestry and Forest Economics in Hamburg, Germany and focused on the analysis of drivers of deforestation/reforestation and spatial modeling of tropical landscape dynamics in the Philippines and Ecuador. Previously, he spent 4 years working at Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Indonesia, and is responsible to integrate socio-economic and spatial data for analyzing drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Indonesia, Vietnam, Peru, Brazil, Cameroon and Zambia. He was also an observer of UN Climate negotiations, following the progress of REDD+ and climate change mitigation negotiations.

He holds a PhD in Geoinformatics from Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany and MSc in Natural Resources Management from International Institute of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) The Netherlands.

Apart from the work, he loves cooking and enjoys Asian culinary, listening music and watching movies.