Pinto da Silva focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to integrating biodiversity into sustainable finance mechanisms and financial risk assessments, while also advancing biodiversity literacy among financial actors.

His current research explores biodiversity resilience under future socio-economic pathways in key Earth system forests, particularly boreal and tropical forests, and how these ecosystems are exposed to economic activities. He is also investigating the use of spatially explicit ecological analyses and models within financial risk assessments, including species distribution models, process-based biodiversity models, and landscape prioritization approaches. In this context, he is collaborating with central banks, including the Bank of Spain and the Bank of Portugal, on research and knowledge-exchange initiatives.

His expertise spans spatial ecology, macroecology, and conservation biology, with a strong foundation in metapopulation theory. More recently, his work has examined biodiversity resilience through the lens of complex systems theory. He has extensively studied the impacts of climate and land-use change on biodiversity, applying or collaborating on species distribution models and agent-based simulations to assess biodiversity dynamics across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, covering mammals, birds, insects, and plants.

Pinto da Silva is a Mistra postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre, where he contributes to the Mistra Finance to Revive Biodiversity (FinBio) programme. He is also a visiting researcher at the Natural Capital Alliance at Stanford University. In addition, he is a member of the Earth Resilience and Sustainability Initiative, a joint undertaking by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and Princeton University, and an external collaborator at the Global Change and Sustainability Institute (CHANGE) in Lisbon.