Primary Research Interests: Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, with emphasis on the economic aspects of climate change adaptation and natural hazard risk mitigation, including Critical Infrastructure Resilience, Climate Change Risk Perception, Hurricane Evacuation Behavior, and Disaster Risk Reduction.
Secondary Research Interests: Health and Inequality, Agriculture, Food, Energy, and Sustainable Development, including Sustainable Solution to End Hunger, Food Insecurity, Wind Energy Development.
List of Publication: click here
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
The Resilience of Critical Infrastructures in the Presence of Hurricanes (NSF Award #1832693)
This Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) project develops an integrated resilience modeling framework for mitigating vulnerabilities in critical interdependent infrastructure systems. The framework evaluates the coupled nature of vulnerabilities across physical and social systems in Miami and Houston. By focusing on the effects of recent hurricanes on the interdependent-infrastructures in energy, water, transportation and telecommunication, and the human-infrastructures interactions, the project explores options for resilience. The system vulnerabilities are quantified with regional inoperability based economic-interdependency models. The project will also develop a mobile phone app for information sharing with the public. Thus, this scientific research contribution supports NSF’s mission to promote the progress of science and to advance our national welfare with benefits that will optimize investments in the nation’s critical infrastructures.
Nature Collection: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. (https://www.nature.com/collections/dhiggjeagd)
Effective agricultural interventions could aid efforts to find sustainable solutions for ending hunger. A collection of papers was recently published in Nature to celebrate World Food Day on October 16, 2020. This was part of the Ceres2030 project where eight teams worked on different agricultural interventions to help achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 2: Zero Hunger by 2030. (https://www.iisd.org/publications/ceres2030-sustainable-solutions-end-hunger)
I was part of the Climate-resilient plants team and spent 18 months looking for evidence to help small-scale farmers adopt climate-resilient crops to achieve sustainable crop production, even in the face of climate change.
Publication: Acevedo, M., Pixley, K., Zinyengere, N., Meng, S., Tufan, H., Cichy, K., Bizikova, L., Isaacs, K., Ghezzi-Kopel, K. and Porciello, J. (2020). A scoping review of adoption of climate-resilient crops by small-scale producers in low-and middle-income countries. Nature plants, 6(10), pp.1231-1241. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00783-z