Postdoc Kira Sullivan-Wiley Authors Paper on Future Land Use Narratives in Brazil

Kira Sullivan-Wiley, a post-doctoral associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, co-authored a recent paper presenting a new, interdisciplinary approach using qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand the land-use choices that people make.

In the paper, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, the authors introduced the integrated socio-perceptual (ISP) approach, which “captures variation and identifies patterns in ecological mental maps and future imaginaries in a population, approximates the relevant spatial scales underlying these factors, and identifies relationships between these and land uses.” They illustrated this approach through a case study in the cocoa-producing and Atlantic Forest region of Southern Bahia, Brazil, where they used surveys to capture the narratives that people hold about their land’s future. They found that people who owned more forested land were more likely to be optimistic about the future than those who owned more pasture land, demonstrating a correlation between current land use and narratives about future land use.

Sullivan-Wiley presented this research for the University of Michigan’s FLARE Network (Forests and Livelihoods: Assessment, Research, and Engagement) 2020 Twitter Conference on October 26, in which presenters shared their research with a series of five tweets in five minutes using the hashtag #FLARETC20, followed by a Q&A session. Sullivan-Wiley’s presentation can be viewed below.

Read the full paper here.