In this interdisciplinary and collaborative project, VanWey coordinates a team that includes Andrew Foster and other colleagues from Brown, along with researchers from the Woods Hole Research Center, and Brazilian colleagues from the University of Campinas and the University of São Paulo. The team will be evaluating the state of the Xingu River near Altamira, Pará, Brazil, before construction begins on what will be the world’s third largest hydroelectric project.
This project examines the ways in which climate variability influences human behavior, focusing on migration and resource-sharing within families. In this project, VanWey studies how risk affects migrant transfers in Mexico. This contributes to her larger work looking at how migrant transfers can be used not only to increase the financial well-being of sending households, but to transform the nature of local social institutions, leading to new schools and the protection of natural resources.
This 15-year project with Emilio Moran looks at how households manage forest resources in Brazil. The project studies the relationships between demographic change, land-use change and agricultural development in three sites in the Brazilian Amazon. Central to her work is the question of how the changing availability of family labor affects the extent to which farmers clear existing forestland. Recent work suggests that the process of learning and specialization in different activities also helps to explain the variation and timing of land acquisition and forest clearing.
One of humanity's greatest contemporary challenges is producing enough food to sustain human populations in developing regions while preserving naturally functioning habitats that provide key ecosystem services such as clean drinking water, biodiversity, carbon storage, and climate moderation. This project, which is funded by NSF’s Partnerships for International Research and Education Program, leverages substantial existing investments in Africa by the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) to mount an international and interdisciplinary study of this great challenge.
