Dr. Rebecca Kariuki

Rebecca Kariuki is a postdoctoral researcher at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Tanzania and is affiliated with the Environment and Geography Department, University of York, UK. She holds a PhD in Environmental Geography from the University of York, UK. In her current research she is interested in understanding the impact of changing climates and land uses on the sustainability of future socio-ecological systems in East Africa. Using a participatory future scenario modelling tool, called KESHO (Swahili for "tomorrow"), her research identifies the causes and consequences of historical environmental change and explores plausible trajectories of future environmental change in East Africa. The "KESHO" approach of exploring future environmental change is stakeholder driven and through this, Rebecca’s research has trained over 100 stakeholders from governmental and nongovernmental bodies, academia, and local communities on the scenario development process and has engaged them to identify alternate, realistic and plausible sustainable development pathways in East Africa. As a Carson Fellow, she will assess developed scenarios of future environmental change in Africa from baseline assessments and evaluate the impacts of the developed scenarios on future biodiversity and ecosystem services in East and southern African drylands.

RCC Research Project: East African Futures: Impacts of Land Cover Change on Achieving Sustainable Development Targets

Selected Publications:

• with Linus K. Munishi, Colin J. Courtney-Mustaphi, Claudia Capitani, Anna Shoemaker, Paul J. Lane, and Rob Marchant. "Integrating Stakeholders’ Perspectives and Spatial Modelling to Develop Scenarios of Future Land Use and Land Cover Change in Northern Tanzania." Plos One 16, no. 2 (2021): e0245516. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245516.
• with David Western, Simon Willcock, and Rob Marchant. "Assessing Interactions between Agriculture, Livestock Grazing and Wildlife Conservation Land Uses: A Historical Example from East Africa." Land 10, no. 1 (2021): 46. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10010046.
• with Colin J. Courtney-Mustaphi, Claudia Capitani, Oliver Boles, Rebecca Newman, Linus Munishi, Rob Marchant, and Paul Lane. "Integrating Evidence of Land Use and Land Cover Change for Land Management Policy Formulation along the Kenya-Tanzania Borderlands." Anthropocene 28, (2019): 100228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2019.100228.
• with Simon Willcock, and Rob Marchant. "Rangeland Livelihood Strategies under Varying Climate Regimes: Model Insights from Southern Kenya. Land 7, no. 2 (2018): 47. https://doi.org/10.3390/land7020047.
• with Rob Marchant, and Simon Willcock. "Ecosystem Services in Africa." In The Routledge Handbook of African Development, edited by Tony Binns, Kenneth Lynch, and Etienne Nel, 258–270. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.