Jacobus Petersen

Masters student

e: jacobus.petersen@stx.ox.ac.uk
Image description coming soon

Interests

I am a master’s student in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management (MSc BCM) at the University of Oxford, doing my dissertation research with Dr William Thompson. My project aims to develop metrics for the success of cocoa agroforestry projects, based on the analysis of both biophysical and socio-economic data, and test them with a variety of stakeholders. Over the summer of 2024, I will visit several agroforestry sites in the Ashanti region in Ghana, speaking to farmers and other local and regional stakeholders. I will also be testing the metrics with other organisations in the cocoa value chain, to see how agroforestry transformation can better be integrated into the existing commodity flows. I hope this will provide a farmer-friendly and policy-relevant overview of the key challenges for the adoption of this crucial nature-based solution.

Background

During my undergraduate studies in Geography at the University of Oxford, I specialised in biogeography, in particular studying tropical pollination networks for my undergraduate dissertation. This work, which is currently being reworked into a paper,  took place within the Ecosystems Lab of the School of Geography and the Environment. Next to my master’s, I am working part-time for a carbon market start-up in London (AlliedOffsets), which aggregates data to provide insights into this largely unregulated market. In particular, I am involved in the development of a biodiversity impact assessment tool to ‘rate’ different nature-based projects in the voluntary carbon market. Outside of research, I like to row for St Peter’s College.

Associated projects

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