Don and UGA  colleague Marshall Shepherd are part of a team awarded a NOAA grant focused on improving use and outcomes of using climate forecasting information "Incorporating Principles of Environmental Justice into Forecast Informed Reservoir 
Operations, a Climate and Flood Adaptation Strategy". The team is led by Tom Corringham at the Scripps Institute and UCSD. The work is focused on potential socioeconomic benefits of FIRO to frontline communities and how such benefits might be realized. The ultimate outcome of this project is to integrate assessment of the impacts of FIRO on frontline communities by developing a methodology that can be applied at different stages of the FIRO process that could be implemented nationally. 

​Victor had a great defense and has now earned his MSc from UGA! Congratulations Victor! "Applied Geospatial Data Science for and Integrative Analysis of the Climate of Northeast Brazil". He is heading back to his native Cairiri - we will miss you Victor.

​Congratulations to John as a newly minted PhD! John successfully defended his dissertation "When the rain falls: Adaptation to compound disasters and climate unpredictability in natural resource dependent communities of rural Haiti". John now resides in Ft. Collins, CO with his growing family and works as the Socioeconomic Monitoring Coordinator for the U.S. National Park Service. Have fun teaching your kids whitewater rafting - we will miss you at the HECLab!

Congratulations, Kaila, on your recently published manuscript "Trauma ≠ Identity"! You can read Kaila's piece in UGA's The Classic Journal  

​Don and five collaborators were awarded the UGA Team Impact Award from the Office of the Vice President for Research. Description of the team's work can be found here.  "The Team Impact Award recognizes the critical contributions made by crosscutting teams in addressing today’s complex challenges. Specifically, the award recognizes a team for excellence in innovative and impactful scholarship that either has or soon promises to fundamentally advance knowledge, understanding and/or applications in ways not achievable by individual investigators or single disciplinary approaches alone"

​As one of the finalists for the Anthropology and  Environment Society's Roy Rappaport Prize, Shelly was invited to write a blog post about her research for the society's blog page. Congratulations! You can read it here. Photo by Shelly. 

​​Kaila, Gabrielle (both pictured) and Amaja won the Society for Applied Anthropology's Best Student poster award for their entry "Evolving Environmental Social Contracts Manifest Through Social Media". Congratulations, and thank you Andressa for all your contributions. Poster can be seen here. 

Bruno Ubiali is a 2022 Halperin Memorial Fund recipient from the Society for Economic Anthropology for his proposed research "Present but Invisible: Revealing Perceptions of Forest Products in the Eastern Amazon". The award will pay for predissertation research and for him to present his work at the 2023 SEA conference.

Abstract: The ongoing expansion of government-sponsored logging and cattle ranching in the Brazilian Amazon collides with Indigenous communities that pursue forest-based livelihoods. This predissertation research aims at understanding Indigenous and large-scale farmers’ cultural notions of land, which will  contribute to revealing the cultural and social values of forest-based livelihoods and industrial agriculture in the Amazon and elsewhere. I will undertake this predissertation research in Santarém, Brazil, where Indigenous livelihoods and corporate interests currently are – and have historically been – in stark contrast. I will meet academic partners, establish relationships with communities, and collect data that will inform my dissertation research design.