The Global Change Center is committed to supporting early career researchers through our new Early Career Synergy Grants. This is the second year of this initiative, designed to foster innovative research collaborations among GCC faculty while promoting the professional growth of postdoctoral affiliates and advanced IGC IGEP Fellows. The grants prioritize projects that establish new connections between faculty with limited prior collaboration or that explore entirely new research directions among existing collaborators.

We are pleased to announce the recipient of this year's Synergy Grant!

IGC Fellow Sarah Juster

Climate-Smart Agriculture for improved Nutrition, Energy Access, and Climate Change Resilience in Refugee-Hosting Uganda

Sarah Juster, Forest Resources & Environmental Conservation

Working with Dr. Brian Badgley, Dr. Brian Strahm, and Dr. John Munsell

Malnutrition, energy access, and deforestation are intersecting wicked problems in refugee settings. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) may provide an antidote to these human and environmental challenges in refugee contexts. These interventions are designed to improve food security amid the realities of climate change, to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration, and create sustainable sources of biofuel.

Although the benefits of CSA adoption among smallholder farmers have been demonstrated in a variety of contexts, CSA has not been studied in refugee settings, which are marked by uniquely high levels of poverty, land tenure insecurity, and population growth. To address this gap, this project will establish four replications of a randomized complete block design experiment to study whether CSA can improve annually cropped maize and cassava systems within a northwest Uganda refugee settlement according to socioeconomic and environmental indicators.

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