José Luis is an environmental scientist with a PhD in biogeochemical cycles in agricultural ecosystems in the South of Spain. After finishing the PhD he started his career in Berlin collaborating in different scientific reports focused on assessing pathways for climate change mitigation and nature-based solutions. In other words, he assessed how nature can help us to mitigate climate change.

After this period, he moved to his current work as a scientist for the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), where he is currently in charge of assessing the ecological impact of alternative food initiatives, and especially focused in the case of the Lebensmittelpunkt (food hubs) in Berlin. He assesses how a Lebensmittelpunkt prototype (das Baumhaus) is impacting the natural system.

As always when talking about food, many different topics are interlinked: human-nature connectedness, urban-rural relationships, food self-sufficiency and food system resilience, agro-ecology and traditional local knowledge, or climate change mitigation and adaptation.