He is also a film maker and is currently undertaking an audiovisual research project about the historical ecology of flooding and flooding as disaster in central Thailand (Nov-11 to Apr-12).

During this work he will be based in Bangkok as a visiting researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute-Asia.

The doctoral research sought to relate resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems to agropastoralism and fishing as livelihood practices in the arid and fluctuating environment of southern Madagascar.

Another theme in this research was how different knowledge traditions (e.g. scientific, humanities, indigenous) are brought together in multi-level and cross-scale environmental research and governance with regard to functional, ethical and democratic criteria. In his work Jacob likes to combine qualitative and quantitative methods from ecological, ethnographic and historical research.

Present themes of interest are: Historical ecology of Thailand, planetary boundaries and film research.