Funded Research by Theme

Pamela Jagger

We leverage dynamism in East and Southern Africa’s coupled human, terrestrial and atmospheric systems and its implications for environmental change to predict past, present and future impacts on regional climate, land use, and air quality. We highlight energy transitions as we hypothesize that biomass use and associated dynamics of coupled human, terrestrial, and atmospheric systems play a major role in regional environmental change. Our proposed study has three main scientific challenges. First we seek to understand the human drivers of change in land use and air quality at relatively fine spatial and temporal scales. Second, we use high quality field data from Malawi to calibrate, validate, and scale regional land use and air quality models to understand past, present and future scenarios of environmental change in the region. Third, we evaluate the potential for a novel scalable household energy intervention to mitigate potential impacts of environmental change such as forest loss and deteriorating air quality. Our project will improve capabilities for predicting system responses to future changes, including appropriate estimates of undertraining in modelling predictions.

Funding:
National Science Foundation
(1923568)

Funding Period: 10/1/2018 to 9/30/2020

International Focus: Malawi