Emily is Professor Yadvinder Malhi’s assistant. She liaises with visitors to the Ecosystems Research Programme and external project partners. She organizes ecosystems conferences, events and meetings, and accompanying press and videos. Emily is an assistant for the Global Ecosystems Monitoring Network. She is a producer for GEM TV, and contributes towards the communications strategy for the research programme. Emily has a special interest in elephant Contact: ecology. She can help with Spanish translation. and MPhil Students Festus Asaaga Smallholder agriculture and ecosystem degradation in rural Africa: Empirical analysis of farmers’ land use decisions Festus’s research project focuses more broadly on exploring the interface between smallholder agriculture and ecosystem degradation in rural Africa. Specifically, he seeks to understand how farmers conceptualize and use landscapes, the factors informing their land use decisions and how that influences agricultural productivity and ecosystem degradation using Kakum and Ankasa in Ghana as case study sites. Contact: Meghan Bailey Robust adaptation planning and decision-making: a comparative study of subsistence-oriented communities in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa Meghan examines climate adaptation through a social lens: the role social differentiation and knowledge and power play in adapting agricultural practices. Specifically she is asking: what is the impact of social differentiation on adaptive capacity to environmental change? She uses mixed methods including embedding ethnographic observation and an adaptive version of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index to measure self-determination of household members and inter and intra household level inequality of farming communities in a changing climate. She hopes the research will have practical implications for climate adaptation policy and programs and the humanitarian field more broadly. Meghan also works as a part-time consultant on vulnerable
Emily is Professor Yadvinder Malhi’s assistant. She liaises with visitors to the Ecosystems Research Programme and external project partners. She organizes ecosystems conferences, events and meetings, and accompanying press and videos. Emily is an assistant for the Global Ecosystems Monitoring Network. She is a producer for GEM TV, and contributes towards the communications strategy for the research programme. Emily has a special interest in elephant ecology. She can help with Spanish translation. Contact: and MPhil Students Festus Asaaga Smallholder agriculture and ecosystem degradation in rural Africa: Empirical analysis of farmers’ land use decisions Festus’s research project focuses more broadly on exploring the interface between smallholder agriculture and ecosystem degradation in rural Africa. Specifically, he seeks to understand how farmers conceptualize and use landscapes, the factors informing their land use decisions and how that influences agricultural productivity and ecosystem degradation using Kakum and Ankasa in Ghana as case study sites. Contact: Meghan Bailey Robust adaptation planning and decision-making: a comparative study of subsistence-oriented communities in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and West Africa Meghan examines climate adaptation through a social lens: the role social differentiation and knowledge and power play in adapting agricultural practices. Specifically she is asking: what is the impact of social differentiation on adaptive capacity to environmental change? She uses mixed methods including embedding ethnographic observation and an adaptive version of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index to measure self-determination of household members and inter and intra household level inequality of farming communities in a changing climate. She hopes the research will have practical implications for climate adaptation policy and programs and the humanitarian field more broadly. Meghan also works as a part-time consultant on vulnerable