José Augusto Pádua is professor of Brazilian environmental history at the Institute of History, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he is also coordinator of the History and Nature Laboratory. From 2010 to 2015, he was president of the Brazilian Association for Research and Graduate Studies in Environment and Society (ANPPAS). In 2025, he will assume the presidency of the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOCHA). He was part of the creation team and is a member of the scientific board of the Museum of Tomorrow, which opened in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. He was a senior visiting fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2004 and 2007/2008) and is a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich (since 2014).

From 1991 to 1995, he headed Greenpeace's Forests and Biodiversity campaign in Latin America. As a specialist in environmental history and environmental policy, he has given lectures and courses, as well as participated in fieldworks, in more than forty-five countries.

His main research theme is the history of Brazilian tropical forests, demonstrating their role in the complex construction of the territory as a whole. The theoretical starting point is the need to analyze history beyond political maps, understanding that territories are always full and colored by a variety of ecosystems. The movements of human societies intertwine with the movements that already exist in the crowded territories, modifying them and producing places where natural and cultural diversity mix in an intricate way.  In recent years, he has been working on the need for a more concrete and grounded reading of the idea of the Anthropocene. In other words, without abandoning the planetary perspective and data, to analyze how this global transformation manifests itself concretely in specific regions, countries and social sectors, whether in terms of its history or its consequences

• Land Use – Handbook of the Anthropocene in Latin America I, Bielefeld University Press, 2024 ( Co-edited with Olaf Kaltmeier, Maria Sandovall and Gustavo Zarrilli).
• “An Environmental History of Brazil in the Nineteenth Century”, In: S. Webre (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press, 2022.
• A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America. Berghahn Books, 2018. (Co-edited with John Soluri and Cláudia Leal and published in Spanish in 2019).
•  “Brazil in the History of the Anthropocene”, In: P. Lenna and L. Issberner (eds.), Brazil in the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2017.
• “European Colonialism and Tropical Forest Destruction in Brazil”, In: John R. McNeill, J.A. Pádua and Mahesh Rangarajan (eds.), Environmental History - As If Nature Existed. Oxford University Press, 2010.