Public lecture with
this year’s Georg Forster Research Awardee Britaldo Silveira Soares Filho, who talked about
“Environmental modelling in support of sound policy development”
Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016, 4:00 PM
About the talk:
Soares-Filho’s talk will describe applications of one of the world’s most sophisticated economic and ecological modeling platforms (SimAmazonia and SimBrasil) to help answer several key policy questions now facing Brazil, from infrastructure development, forest policy reform, agriculture expansion, to ranching intensification, as well as the potential impacts of policy choices on regional economies and ecosystem services. In sum, he will show how environmental modeling tools are helping Brazil's government agencies design and coordinate national plans that seek to reconcile development with environmental conservation.
About the speaker:
Britaldo Silveira Soares-Filho is full professor of Department of Cartography, Institute of Geosciences and the current coordinator of CSR (Remote Sensing Center) of Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. His research focuses on modeling of land-use policy scenarios, including integrated simulation of land-use changes in tropical forest regions and the assessment of their impacts on climate, river regime, carbon balance, forest fires, agriculture and forestry rents, and biodiversity. In addition, Dr. Soares-Filho coordinates the development of DINAMICA EGO software (www.csr.ufmg.br/dinamicaEGO), an environmental modeling freeware used by many scholars worldwide.
About the Georg Foster Research Award:
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation grants Georg Forster Research Awards, each valued at €60,000, to researchers from developing and transition countries. One woman researcher and seven male colleagues will receive this year’s Georg Forster Research Awards by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award targets researchers from developing and transition countries who have earned international recognition for their research work and seek to solve development-related issues. The award winners are invited to spend time in Germany establishing and building collaboration with colleagues here. Valued at € 60,000 each, the Georg Forster Research Awards are financed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). For this round of research awards, the ministry provided funding for three additional awards for climate-related research because climate protection is currently one of the main areas of focus for the ministry's work.
Georg Forster Research Awards for climate-related research
Britaldo Silveira Soares Filho (57) is one of this year’s eight award-winners. He is head of the Department of Cartography at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He has developed innovative methods in the field of geography and cartography which make it possible to precisely predict how tropical rainforests – such as in the Amazon basin – will develop. Based on these models, the government of Brazil has implemented a variety of protective measures and is planning more for the future. For his research in Germany, Soares Filho will work at the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn.
See www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/press-release-2015-26.html
