Rebecca Kariuki is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University

Abstract

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) occurs in response to interactions between local human actions, policies, regional and global markets, climate change impacts and environmental factors that occur at varying scales. On one hand, LULCC occurs to meet the food and infrastructural needs of growing populations; on the other hand, LULCC often fragments wildlife habitats, drives biodiversity loss, and affects nature’s contributions to people. Insights on the synergies and trade-offs between food production, development and conservation are necessary to support sustainable land uses that avoid unintended consequences. In this talk, I will discuss my research on LULCC impacts on wildlife, livestock, and communities at the Kenya-Tanzania borderland region. This region covers several ecosystem gradients and supports high biomass of wildlife and livestock than most ecosystems globally. Specifically, I will discuss how climate variability and insecure land tenure drives land use change and habitat fragmentation, how payment of conservation subsidies can enhance land sharing between wildlife and livestock, preserve the cultural heritage of communities, and improve communities’ attitudes toward wildlife, and how multi-stakeholder perspectives and spatial modelling can develop future LULCC scenarios and assess their implications on biodiversity and societies. This talk will highlight the value of participatory approaches in understanding diverse, plausible futures in the face of uncertainty and the contribution of place-based research in addressing global sustainability challenges of land use change and biodiversity loss.

Bio
Dr. Rebecca Kariuki is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University (ASU), USA. She is also an affiliate of the African Academy of Sciences, Nairobi, Kenya. Her research integrates interdisciplinary perspectives from the natural and social sciences to understand land use systems in East and Southern Africa savannas, the implications of land use change on biodiversity and rural livelihoods, and potential pathways to achieving sustainable land use systems in future. She engages diverse stakeholders, conducts ecological surveys, and utilizes GIS and spatial modeling to assess trade-offs in land use management of multiple use landscapes in Africa.

https://schoolofsustainability.asu.ed...
Prior to joining ASU, Rebecca was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in Arusha, Tanzania and the University of York in the UK, a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich, Germany and a Climate Change Fellow at the African Institute for Mathematical Science in Kigali, Rwanda.