{"id":57598,"date":"2012-03-30T10:44:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T14:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=57598"},"modified":"2012-03-30T11:08:55","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T15:08:55","slug":"graduate-student-helping-others-adapt-to-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/03\/graduate-student-helping-others-adapt-to-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Graduate Student Helping Others Adapt to Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rachael<\/a>
Rachael Shenyo, a master's student in agricultural and resource economics.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Climate change in Guatemala is making an already difficult existence even more so for people who struggle to make a living in rugged terrain thousands of feet above sea level. Rachel Shenyo, a master\u2019s degree candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, has personally witnessed the change, and she has plans to do something about it.<\/p>\n

When she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala from 2002 to 2004, Shenyo quickly grew to admire the resourcefulness of the indigenous people with whom she worked. With an undergraduate degree in animal science, she provided de facto veterinary service to local farmers in remote villages and watched as they cultivated their crops on small parcels of land in the rural highlands. She also started a USDA grant-funded initiative to help improve income from sheep production, a project she worked on for seven years prior to coming to UConn.<\/p>\n

Now, as a student working under the guidance of her advisor, Professor Boris Bravo-Ureta in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, she has made several trips back to this Central American country in an effort to explore how residents view climate change and what adjustments they have made in their farming practices.<\/p>\n

\"Local<\/a>
Local residents grow corn, beans, and squash together on the same hill. The corn provides a framework for the beans and squash, and the beans provide nitrogen for the other two plants. (Rachael Shenyo\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been working with a government agency and we\u2019ve looked at 40 years of climate data,\u201d she says, \u201cand one of the things we\u2019ve noticed is that wind directions have changed. Historically we\u2019ve documented that Guatemala was rarely hit by hurricane winds, maybe a couple of direct hits in 100 years, but in the last seven years they\u2019ve been battered by six major tropical systems. Last October, they had five feet of rain in 10 days.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in this fragile, mountainous environment,\u201d Shenyo continues, \u201cis that the infrastructure is becoming completely overwhelmed. We\u2019re finding that not only is the climate changing, it\u2019s changing with the altitude. This means that crops are affected in different ways and that growing conditions are dramatically different from farm to farm, depending on the altitude where it is located.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shenyo was a Tinker Grant<\/a> recipient in the summer of 2011, and she used her stipend to travel to the Central American country she had first gotten to know during her stint in the Peace Corps. She returned in January 2012 and conducted 130 field interviews with families in eight different villages at eight different altitudes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to find out how residents perceive what\u2019s happening to their environment and how they\u2019re being impacted. We discovered [in preliminary analysis] that every three years, most families are experiencing between 30 per cent and 100 per cent crop loss,\u201d she says. \u201cThese are some of the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere and we\u2019re trying to determine if economic models can be used in conjunction with scientific models to suggest some sort of adaptation strategy. We want to reduce the vulnerability [to climate change] and increase the area\u2019s ability to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Local<\/a>
Local residents are desperate to expand the amount of ground that is planted when crop production starts to fail. Planting on steep hillsides contributes to problems of erosion. (Rachael Shenyo\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even if an individual farmer isn\u2019t focusing on larger economic issues, Shenyo points to the importance of letting governmental policy makers know what\u2019s happening in the \u2018real world.\u2019 \u201cWe realize that economic analysis may not help farmers in this growing season or the next, but by making the government aware of potential long-term goals we can make progress,\u201d she says. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019re focusing on is how crops are grown. In this part of the world we see a lot of monoculture \u2026 one crop or one variety of a crop grown in large quantities. We think that introducing a polyculture, where different varieties are grown, may be the way to go. If 30 percent of the time you expect floods in a certain area, let\u2019s try to find flood-resistant varieties of corn; let\u2019s plant 30 percent of your crop with that [variety], because it will produce no matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bravo-Ureta is impressed with Shenyo\u2019s determination to make a difference. He says, \u201cRachael is down to earth and she knows what she wants to do. She\u2019s someone who wants to be involved at the grass-roots level and she has an appreciation of the indigenous people in Guatemala; they may be poor but they\u2019re survivors and that \u2018can do\u2019 attitude appeals to her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The town of Zunil is the location of one of Central America's most important wholesale markets. (Rachael Shenyo\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The U.S. State Department recently awarded a grant for $480,000 to UConn\u2019s Global Training and Development Institute<\/a> <\/span>to develop a Women\u2019s Empowerment Program \u2013 <\/em>a two-way Professional Fellows exchange program in partnership with the University for Peace in Costa Rica. The program is designed to address issues such as economic development, environmental sustainability, and family health, and Shenyo has been chosen to represent the U.S. as a Fellow. She will travel to Costa Rica in August, where she will share her knowledge of sustainability issues with women who share her concern for the environment.<\/p>\n

Once she completes her degree, probably sometime this summer, Shenyo plans to return to Guatemala, where she hopes to develop an NGO that will coordinate the many diverse efforts already in place.<\/p>\n

\u201cCurrently,\u201d she says, \u201cthere are localized pockets of expertise with some people studying weather patterns and some studying agriculture and some studying cultural norms, but unfortunately these efforts are not coordinated, and important messages are not getting through to the governmental policy-makers who could make a difference if they understood the whole picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

She envisions establishing an agency that is part research, part education, and part outreach, in an effort to assure sound land use decision-making that will benefit a people who won her admiration when she first met them as a Peace Corps volunteer a decade ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A UConn master’s student is working with Guatemalan villagers and policy makers to suggest strategies for agricultural adaptation in the face of major crop losses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":56358,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1715,88,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-57598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-impact","category-global-affairs","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-10 11:44:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57598"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61854,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57598\/revisions\/61854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/56358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57598"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=57598"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=57598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}