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Professor Peng is a broadly trained environmentalist and has research experience in land use and food sustainability, climate change, and water resources. Originally from Guangdong, she received her B.S. in Geosciences and B.A. in Philosophy from Peking University in 2013, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2019. Prior to joining HKU, she served as the chief modeler in the Food Programme at World Resources Institute (WRI), a global environmental think tank, in Washington D.C.
At HKU, she is a joint professor at the Department of Geography and Institute for Climate and Carbon Neutrality. She leads the Accounting and Policy for Land Use Sustainability (APLUS) research group, aiming at achieving food sustainability and providing solutions to mitigate the climate impacts of land use activities. Her current work involves developing carbon accounting models for forestry and agriculture to support global and national land use policy recommendations.
Research Interests
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Carbon and land use carbon accounting
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Sustainable forestry and agriculture
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Biophysical modeling
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Drought monitoring and data assimilation
Selected Publications
2024
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Peng, L., Sheffield, J., Wei, Z., Ek, M., & Wood, E. F., 2024. An Enhanced SPEI Drought Monitoring Method Integrating Land Surface Characteristics. Earth System Dynamics.
2023
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Peng, L., Searchinger, T. D., Zionts, J., & Waite, R., 2023. The carbon costs of global wood harvests. Nature, 620(7972), 110-115.
2022
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Feng, Y., Zeng, Z., Searchinger, T. D., … Peng, L., … Wood, E. F., & Zheng, C., 2022. Doubling of annual forest carbon loss over the tropics during the early twenty-first century. Nature Sustainability, 5(5), 444–451.
2021
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Peng, L., Wei, Z., Zeng, Z., Lin, P., Wood, E. F., & Sheffield, J., 2021. Reducing solar radiation forcing uncertainty and its impact on surface energy and water fluxes. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 22(4), 813-829.
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Zeng, Z., Wang, D., Yang, L., … Peng, L., …, Caylor, K., & Wood, E. F., 2021. Deforestation-induced warming over tropical mountain regions regulated by elevation. Nature Geoscience, 14(1), 23–29.
2020
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Chen, H., Zeng, Z., Wu, J., Peng, L., Lakshmi, V., Yang, H., & Liu, J., 2020. Large uncertainty on forest area change in the early 21st century among widely used global land cover datasets. Remote Sensing, 12(21), 3502.
2019
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Peng, L., Zeng, Z, Wei, Z., Chen, A., Wood, E. F., & Sheffield, J., 2019. Determinants of the ratio of actual to potential evapotranspiration. Global Change Biology, 25(4), 1326–1343.
2018
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Peng, L., Li, D., & Sheffield, J., 2018. Drivers of variability in atmospheric evaporative demand: Multiscale spectral analysis based on observations and physically based modeling. Water Resources Research, 54(5), 3510-3529.
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Zeng, Z.*, Peng, L.*, & Piao, S., 2018. Response of terrestrial evapotranspiration to Earth's greening. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 33, 9-25.
2015 and before
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Wang, X., Peng, L., Zhang, X., Yin, G., Zhao, C. and Piao, S., 2014. Divergence of climate impacts on maize yield in Northeast China. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 196, 51-58.