Short Gianotti publishes on productivity gains & risk management in Land Use Policy
Anne Short Gianotti, Associate Director of the Land Use and Livelihoods Initiative (LULI) at the GDP Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University, recently published the article “Pursuing productivity gains and risk reduction in a multi-hazard landscape: A case study from eastern Uganda” in the journal Land Use Policy.
With co-author Kira Sullivan-Wiley, BU alumna and Pardee Center Post-Doctoral Associate, Dr. Short Gianotti analyzed the co-beneficial role that agricultural land and natural resource management has to play in both hazard risk mitigation and increased crop productivity for rural populations. Sullivan-Wiley and Short Gianotti investigated the voluntary adoption of agricultural land management practices among smallholder farmers in the Bugisu sub-region of eastern Uganda, a region with high poverty levels and multiple environmental hazards. They demonstrate that socioeconomic and risk perception factors have a particularly significant impact on the adoption of more labor-intensive practices. They also emphasize the influence that risk reduction and development organizations (RDOs) can have on reducing farmers’ knowledge and material constraints, and thereby facilitating adoption of such practices.
Photo credit: Rod Waddington, Uganda, Flickr.