PhD Studentship - Spatial econometric modelling of land use and ecosystem services

SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College, delivers comprehensive skills, education and business support for Scotland’s land-based industry founded on world class, sector leading research, education and consultancy. SRUC’s joint submission with the University of Edinburgh to the Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science subpanel of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) ranks top in the UK on research power.
Changes in land use affect not only the production of food and timber, but also other ecosystem services such as climate regulation and biodiversity. The multifunctionality of agricultural activity is increasingly recognised by policy makers and requires the development of integrated assessment tools to analyse the trade-offs and synergies between food security, energy, climate and biodiversity. Because environmental conditions vary across space, integrated assessments of the trade-offs and synergies between multiple policy objectives need to be spatially explicit.
The aim of the PhD project is to develop a spatially explicit integrated assessment model of land use change. The model will be used to provide robust evidence for policy development and appraisal of the impacts of the recent EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform on land use, production and ecosystem services.
The study will draw on spatial data regarding land use, agricultural production, climate and environmental indicators and will use econometric tools to estimate land use models. The models will be used to simulate public policies and to analyse their impacts. While the work will primarily focus on the UK, there will be an opportunity to explore French and European datasets. The student is expected to spend an extended period of time in France, at the Joint Research Unit in Public Economics (a research and teaching unit at INRA focussing on agricultural and environmental applied economics). This will provide an opportunity to collaborate with the co-supervisor Dr Raja Chakir and other researchers and postgraduate students working on similar topics.
This is a joint research project between SRUC, INRA and the University of Edinburgh. The student will be based in SRUC’s Land Economy, Environment and Society Research Group, King’s Buildings, Edinburgh. The student will be registered at the University of Edinburgh and will work under the supervision of Dr Klaus Glenk in association with Dr Raja Chakir (INRA), Vera Eory (SRUC) and Dr Ron Wilson (University of Edinburgh).

This 3.5 year studentship provides a stipend of £14,057 per annum and is funded to pay the University tuition fees for UK/European Union students only. The expected start date is September/October 2015.