Developing policies for tropical land management

An OU academic has received EU funding to develop policy-relevant knowledge for land management in tropical countries, informed by historical ecological understanding of past landscapes in India.

Dr Shonil Bhagwat, Senior Lecturer in Geography, in the OU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, has been successful in gaining a total of €171,023 funding from Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) for EARNEST (Examining the Agroforestry Landscape Resilience in India to inform Social-Ecological Sustainability in the Tropics).

“We are grateful for EU funding under Horizon 2020 programme’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) for Individual Fellowship to Dr Charuta Kulkarni, who is a promising Indian scientist and EARNEST will give her an opportunity to spend 21 months conducting research in Europe,” said Dr Bhagwat. “EARNEST will go a long way in helping us to generate policy-relevant knowledge that helps with effective management of human-dominated tropical forest landscapes in the face of global environmental change and its impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and the livelihoods of billions of people.”

Dr Charuta Kulkarni (currently at City University, New York, USA) will be appointed as a Research Fellow for the project at the OU for 21 months from 1 September 2018. Other collaborators are Centre national de la recherche scientifique, with potential to collaborate with the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton.

Read more about Dr Bhagwat’s research

Find out about OU research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences