Pardee Center Postdocs Present at AAG Annual Meeting

Several scholars affiliated with the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future presented research at the 2019 American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting held from April 3-7 in Washington, DC.

Post-doctoral associate Laurence Delina presented a paper titled, “Energy Use for Productive Purposes as Indicator for Energy Access: Lessons Learned from Thailand and the Philippines.” The paper explores alternative approaches to measuring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) — which calls for achieving universal energy access — rather than the traditional barometer of whether or not full electrification is achieved. Specifically, Delina explores the ‘energy use for productive purposes’ metric using case studies from Thailand and the Philippines before and after electrification. The results show that changes to average annual household income and time spent generating income are useful for understanding the quality of energy access interventions in previously un-electrified communities.

Post-doctoral associate Kira Sullivan-Wiley presented a paper titled “Mental maps and future imaginaries: How farmers in Bahia’s Cacau Coast are transforming rural livelihoods and challenging assumptions of a producer-forest conflict.” The paper explores the assumption that reforestation efforts aimed at combatting climate change are often in conflict with small and family farmers’ preferred agricultural futures. Through a qualitative analysis of 52 farmers in the Cacau Coast of Bahia, Brazil, two narratives emerged, neither of which presented forests and agricultural futures as being in conflict. At the meeting, Sullivan-Wiley also convened a series of three sessions with colleagues from Indiana University, titled “Adoption of Conservation Practices in Agri-Environmental Governance: Social, Institutional, and Biophysical Factors of Participation.”

Post-doctoral associate Qi Zhang presented a paper titled “Interactions of payments for ecosystem services with land use change and labor migration.” The paper is a follow up to his PhD dissertation work, aiming to understand feedbacks between human behavior (rural labor out-migration) and land use change (cropland abandonment) under China’s “payments for ecosystem services” (PES) forest conservation policies in rural Anhui, China. 

Finally, Visiting Research Fellow Yuan Gao, Faculty of Geographical Science at Beijing Normal University in China, presented a paper titled “Study on Global Maize Yield Vulnerability to Precipitation Change.” The paper explores the maize yield vulnerability across different regions based on various precipitation change components (such as trend, fluctuation, and extreme cases) that may occur due to global climate change.

The AAG Annual Meeting brings together over 8,500 geographers for the latest in research and applications in geography, sustainability, and GIScience. The 2019 meeting featured over 6,900 presentations, posters, workshops, and field trips by leading experts.