Sabrina Rose is part of the iSPARK project’s management team, where she helps to steer the research towards impact. In this interview, Sabrina Rose discusses her professional background, climate change adaptation and mitigation policies, and the work of the iSPARK project.
Bio
Sabrina Rose is a Science Officer with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. She coordinates the UK-CGIAR Centre’s iSPARK project and the CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience, ClimBeR, collaborating across research areas spanning climate policy and agricultural risk management in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Her research focuses on climate and agricultural policy in the Global South and has covered topics such as climate finance, climate adaptation, and agroecology. She holds a master’s degree in climate policy and development economics from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Q. What is your academic and professional background and how has it shaped your current thinking?
I have an interdisciplinary background in engineering and policy. My undergraduate degree is in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and my master’s degree is in climate policy and development economics from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. I appreciate the systems thinking principles that I learned in my undergraduate years. My time at Fletcher allowed me to apply a systems thinking lens to the issues that I am passionate about—climate change and development, particularly in the agricultural sector.
After graduating undergrad, I worked as a consultant for several years at ICF in Washington, DC on climate and sustainability projects for the US government. This experience helped me understand climate mitigation priorities from a developed country perspective. However, it was my experience in graduate school and at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (a member of CGIAR) that helped me better understand the challenges and solutions in climate change and development concerning smallholder farmers around the world.
Q. When did you first become interested in climate change?
I’ve been interested in climate change since I was a sophomore in high school. I vividly remember my Physics teacher showing our class Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Ever since, I’ve been curious about climate change and what I could do to help address one of the greatest challenges of our time. The issue seemed too urgent and all-encompassing for me to ignore even at that age.
My interest in climate change’s impact on the agricultural sector and vice versa began several years later at my first job at ICF. I had the opportunity to support greenhouse gas emissions inventories in the agriculture sector for the US Environmental Protection Agency. It was fascinating to learn how the food system contributes to climate change, but at the same time it is extremely vulnerable to climate change.
Q. Developing climate change adaptation and mitigation policies that don’t compromise food security in low- and middle-income countries is often seen as a difficult balancing act. Where do you see the major gaps in current policy thinking and practices related to this issue?
Current practice focuses much on developing sound climate adaptation and mitigation policies but less so on implementation, and monitoring and evaluating the impact of policies and the interventions they promote. Low- and middle-income countries still need significantly more funds to implement policies and to track the impact of policies over time. Only 4 percent of climate finance is directed towards agrifood systems, and less than 1 percent of climate finance flows to small-scale agrifood systems, including smallholder farmers.
iSPARK helps to create the evidence base around the impact of agricultural interventions over time and across geographies. Specifically, iSPARK seeks to understand which agricultural practices improve sustainability, resilience, and adaptation outcomes in the short term and long term for farmers and at a national level. This information can help build the investment case for specific solutions and mobilize resources for implementation.
Q. You’ll be working as part of the aforementioned UK-CGIAR Centre project iSPARK. How do you see your knowledge of climate change policy feeding into this project?
As part of the iSPARK management team, I help to steer our research towards impact. We manage the project strategically so that we can achieve our goals of providing improved advisories to thousands of farmers, informing policies, and shaping investment plans based on the best science. My background in climate policy gives me the language to communicate our project’s objectives and results to diverse audiences. It also helps me to manage the project adaptively and collaboratively, since policy influence is a complex (messy) process. My background in systems engineering gives me the technical perspective to understand some of the more complex topics that our research team is exploring. I’m grateful we have a very interdisciplinary team.
Q. How do you see this project evolving over the next few years?
Our first year laid the groundwork for future activities. We focused on defining our collaboration with organizations such as iShamba and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, which will have key roles in iSPARK moving forward. Next year, we’ll work together to select the innovations that we plan to evaluate to understand their contributions to sustainability, resilience, and adaptation. Next year will also be a key moment to define emerging opportunities for policy influence. By the third year, we expect to have already defined pathways towards impact through policies, investments, and improved advisories for farmers. We will also implement monitoring and evaluation studies to measure our impact.