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Wageningen PhD candidate Glory Edwards awarded Green Talent

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30 oktober 2020

Glory Edwards of Wageningen University & Research has been awarded one of the 25 Green Talents. The jury honours her broad and extensive research profile and the high relevance of her research on sustainable rice production in Nigeria. The awards are initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to stimulate international cooperation in sustainability research.

A sustainable rice system in Nigeria

Glory Ikponmwosa Edwards works at the Environmental Systems Analysis group on developing scenarios for pathways to a sustainable rice system in Nigeria. She develops these pathways by combining qualitative and quantitative methods including stakeholder participation, fuzzy cognitive maps, and land-use modelling.

Prof. Rik Leemans, chair of the Environmental Systems Analysis group, is delighted with the news of the award for the PhD candidate he is supervising together with Kasper Kok: “The reviewers of her PhD proposal were already impressed and this Award now certainly inspires her further to advance this important sustainability and food security research in her home country.”

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A highly complex system

Currently, rice farming is the largest single use of land for producing food in the world. In Africa, rice is the fastest growing staple. Rice production needs to be increased to accommodate the world’s growing demand for rice while at the same time environmental impacts, such as greenhouse gas emissions and eutrophication, have to be reduced. Simultaneously, the production must adapt to climate change. The rice-farming system is highly complex; it is driven by interacting social, economic and environmental factors and requires an integrated approach to assess and understand its past, current and future states.

Glory Edwards aims to develop an analytical framework to integrate adaptation and mitigation pathways at a landscape level to envision a sustainable rice-farming system in her home country Nigeria. She seeks to answer the questions What is? (current system description); what could be? (scenarios/plausible futures) and What should be? (envisioning pathways).

Green Talents- International Forum for High Potentials in Sustainable Development

Every year, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research hosts the prestigious Green Talents – International Forum for High Potentials in Sustainable Development to promote the international exchange of innovative green ideas from various fields of research. The award honours young researchers. The winners come from numerous countries and scientific disciplines and are recognised for their outstanding achievements in making our societies more sustainable. The award winners are selected by a jury of German experts. This year the 25 Green Talents awardees are out of 22 countries.