ANN ARBOR—Christoph Nolte, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, has been selected as the first recipient of the Marshall Weinberg Population, Development, and Climate Change Fellowship.

Nolte is studying the economic tradeoffs of land conservation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

The award, which is jointly administered by SNRE and by the Population Studies Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research, supports research that is at the intersection of climate change, demography and development.

Nolte is using Brazilian census data from 2000 and 2010 covering 30,000 Amazonian census tracts “to tackle one of the core questions of conservation,” according to his profile. “To what extent does setting aside land for conservation impact global economic opportunities?

Specifically, Brazil has doubled its protected areas in the last decade, and Nolte is studying what difference investments in those protected areas have made in poverty levels, migration and reducing deforestation.

On the award website, Weinberg says that he established the new fellowship “in the belief that interdisciplinary research and collaboration are necessary to the future of universities and to their ability to solve societal problems.”

“I also believe that the great ideas that will solve societal problems are going to come from our best and brightest young thinkers—our graduate students,” he says.

Related Links:

• Christoph Nolte video and profile: www.sampler.isr.umich.edu/2012/featured/christoph-nolte-studying-the-economic-tradeoffs-of-land-conservation-in-brazil
• Marshall Weinberg Population, Development, and Climate Change Fellows Program: www.snre.umich.edu/assets/weinberg/index.php

U-M Sustainability fosters a more sustainable world through collaborations across campus and beyond aimed at educating students, generating new knowledge, and minimizing our environmental footprint. Learn more at sustainability.umich.edu.