Uche Okpara
- Fellow in Climate Change and State Fragility - Natural Resources Institute
email:
u.t.okpara@gre.ac.uk
Research interests
Dr Uche Okpara is an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist working across a wide range of research areas in Environment, Security and Sustainable Development. His research advances understanding of nature-society relationships focusing on:
- the complex relationships between climate change, violent conflict and fragility;
- gender equality, food security and natural resources (land and water) management; and
- the practical and policy mechanisms that can advance climate resilience, peacebuilding and sustainable development in stressed environments.
Specifically, Uche is interested in understanding:
- how everyday lives and ordinary livelihood expectations are being significantly altered by social and ecological disasters;
- how food security and environmental management pathways can be co-created to balance competing social-ecological priorities and human welfare needs in conflict-prone environments;
- how environmental shocks experienced in drylands enable the emergence of conflict economies, including how the experience of conflict undermines a society’s ability to cope with climate change; and
- how anticipations of future shocks and stresses feed into modes of socio-ecological systems governance that prevent a compounding cycle of fragility.
