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Malika Virah-Sawmy

Malika Virah-Sawmy

Doctor of Philosophy

About

43
Publications
16,597
Reads
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1,459
Citations
Introduction
I have a proven track record in research and policy analysis in the food-environment nexus for the development of innovative policy solutions, several years of experience implementing conservation and livelihood programmes on the ground, and the experience and skills needed for leading collaborative processes with diverse sets of stakeholders to ensure ownership of problems and solution options.
Additional affiliations
April 2014 - June 2016
Luc Hoffmann Institute
Position
  • Research Lead
January 2013 - June 2014
UNSW Sydney
Position
  • Lecturer
Education
October 2005 - June 2009
University of Oxford
Field of study
  • Geography and Environment

Publications

Publications (43)
Article
Full-text available
Evaluation has so much potential for learning, co-creation, and collaboration around more inclusive and regenerative programs and, ultimately, systems. Yet, currently, evaluations are often experienced as controlling and frustrating add-ons. Inspired by developmental evaluation, we have experimented with generative methods to make evaluation a spac...
Book
Full-text available
The book is free from IUCN, see https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/51451 Highlights: • Oil crops occupy roughly 37% of the world’s agricultural land, and oil demand is growing. • By 2050, expected demand for vegetable oils could require a 14% increase in production – potentially threatening biodiversity if natural areas are cleared for vegeta...
Article
Land use is a key driver of the ongoing biodiversity crisis and therefore also a major opportunity for its miti-gation. However, appropriately considering the diversity of land-use actors and activities in conservation assessments and planning is challenging. As a result, top-down conservation policy and planning are often criticized for a lack of...
Article
Full-text available
Planting trees is proposed as an important climate mitigation tool, but can be detrimental to biodiversity and livelihoods if not carefully planned and managed, with landscape history and livelihoods in mind. In Madagascar, deforestation is of concern, and a threat to forest-adapted biota. However, much of Madagascar’s landscape harbours ancient mo...
Article
Full-text available
Indigenous communities depend on natural capital and adapt their livelihoods to changing environmental conditions and ecosystem services. This paper aims to understand how southwestern Malagasy living around the Mikea National Park and the Mangoky River, have adapted their subsistence strategies to decreasing rainfall over time. We analyzed charcoa...
Chapter
Full-text available
This paper presents the pollen data and its interpretation of a small lake in southwest Madagascar.
Article
Madagascar experienced environmental change during the Late-Holocene, and the relative importance of climatic and anthropogenic drivers is still the subject of an ongoing debate. Using palaeoecological records from the southwest region at Lake Longiza, we provide additional records to elucidate the complex history of the island and to identify the...
Article
Multiple sustainability initiatives have emerged in response to the environmental impacts of soy production, especially deforestation and climate change. But company commitments to reduce deforestation in their supply chains are not leading to outcomes on the ground. Achieving concerted action by supply chain actors requires consideration of their...
Article
Trade agreements could help to protect human rights, critical ecosystems, and the climate—but only if sustainability becomes a cornerstone of international trade. The EU-Mercosur trade agreement fails to meet our three tenets of sustainable trade agreements: (1) inclusion of local communities, (2) transparency mechanisms to trace commodities and pr...
Article
Full-text available
Further progress in reducing biodiversity loss relies on the improved quantification of the connections between drivers of habitat loss and subsequent biodiversity impacts. To this end, biodiversity impact metrics should be able to report linked trends in specific human activities and changes in biodiversity state, accounting for both the ecology o...
Article
Full-text available
Consumption of globally traded agricultural commodities like soy and palm oil is one of the primary causes of deforestation and biodiversity loss in some of the world’s most species-rich ecosystems. However, the complexity of global supply chains has confounded efforts to reduce impacts. Companies and governments with sustainability commitments str...
Article
Full-text available
Brazil, home to one of the planet’s last great forests, is currently in trade negotiations with its second largest trading partner, the European Union (EU). We urge the EU to seize this critical opportunity to ensure that Brazil protects human rights and the environment. Brazil’s forests, wetlands, and savannas are crucial to a great diversity of I...
Article
Market governance is viewed as a potentially effective mechanism to achieve more sustainable global production-to-consumption systems when state regulation between production and consumption regions is uncoordinated. Through examining a key global food sector, the soy–meat value chain, we assess how effective market governance is. In this sector, n...
Article
Adaptive management (AM) and evidence-based conservation (EBC) have emerged as major decision-making frameworks for conservation management. AM deals with complexity and the importance of local context in making conservation decisions under conditions of high variability, uncertainty, and rapid environmental and social change. EBC seeks for general...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aim: Quantifying connections between the global drivers of habitat loss and biodiversity impact is vital for decision-makers promoting responsible land-use. To that end, biodiversity impact metrics should be able to report linked trends in specific anthropogenic activities and changes in biodiversity state. However, for biodiversity, it is challeng...
Data
Research on sources of Madagascan IHCE estimates. (PDF)
Article
Full-text available
Boundary organizations have been promoted as a measure to improve the effectiveness of conservation efforts by building stronger relationships between scientists, policy makers, industry and practitioners (Cook et al. 2013). While their promise has been discussed in theory, the work of and expectations for boundary organizations are less defined in...
Chapter
The debate on the peopling of Madagascar has long been dominated by historical linguistics and the observed similarities between Malagasy and Austronesian languages. It is clear from the linguistic evidence that there have been several periods of human contact with, or migration to, Madagascar—and that these also brought different domesticates to t...
Article
Full-text available
Reducing rates of biodiversity loss and achieving environmental goals requires an understanding of what is threatening biodiversity, where and how fast the threats are changing in type and intensity, and appropriate actions needed to avert them. One might expect that the Information Age – typified by a deluge of data resulting from massive and wide...
Article
Context Integrated conservation decision-making frameworks that help to design or adjust practices that are cognisant of environmental change and adaptation are urgently needed. Objective We demonstrate how a landscape vulnerability framework combining sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and exposure to climate change framed along two main axes of con...
Article
This paper introduces an important concept for improving sustainability in the extractive industries: inclusive business. Drawing upon examples of inclusive business, as well as the challenges posed from corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies in the extractive sector aimed at socio-economic goals, this paper shows how inclusive business is...
Article
Performance-based payments are widely seen as a promising tool for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) in tropical forests. Despite great advances in international REDD+ negotiations, there is a lack of consensus around the development of business-as-usual (BAU) reference scenarios or baselines to derive and quantify...
Article
Protected areas are our principal conservation strategy, but require surveillance and monitoring for effective management. Many are threatened by shifting cultivation, a practice that is difficult to detect accurately with satellite imagery and is generally carried out clandestinely in isolated areas. Since 2010, oblique aerial photography has been...
Article
Mining and associated infrastructure developments can present themselves as economic opportunities that are difficult to forego for developing and industrialised countries alike. Almost inevitably, however, they lead to biodiversity loss. This trade-off can be greatest in economically poor but highly biodiverse regions. Biodiversity offsets have, t...
Article
Aim There remains some uncertainty concerning the causes of extinctions of Madagascar’s megafauna. One hypothesis is that they were caused by over‐hunting by humans. A second hypothesis is that their extinction was caused by both environmental change and hunting. This paper systematically addresses the second hypothesis through examination of two n...
Article
Conceptual models suggest a link between spatial heterogeneity, diversity, and resilience, but few empirical studies exist to demonstrate such an ecological relationship. In this study, we investigated the nature of spatial heterogeneity and resilience of two forest fragments from Madagascar's highly endangered littoral forest, and two nearby sites...
Article
Full-text available
Biological invasions by non-indigenous species are widely recognized as an important threat to biodiversity. However, the dimension, magnitude and mechanism of the impacts of invasive species remains poorly understood. We assessed the role of invasive plants by comparing vegetation changes that occurred between 1939 and 1999, a snapshot period that...
Article
Full-text available
Madagascar's rainforests are among the most biodiverse in the world. Understanding the population dynamics of important species within these forests in response to past climatic variability provides valuable insight into current and future species composition. Here, we use a population-level approach to analyse palaeoecological records over the las...
Article
Aim Coastal biodiversity hotspots are globally threatened by sea-level rise. As such it is important to understand how ecosystems resist, respond and adapt to sea-level rise. Using pollen, geochemistry, charcoal and diatom records in conjunction with previously published palaeoclimatic records, we investigated the mechanism, interactions and ecosys...
Article
Aim Grasslands and savannas, which make up > 75% of Madagascar's land area, have long been viewed as anthropogenically derived after people settled on the island c. 2 ka. We investigated this hypothesis and an alternative - that the grasslands are an insular example of the post-Miocene spread of C 4 grassy biomes world-wide. Location Madagascar, so...

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