Festus Amadu

Festus Amadu is the Founder & Coordinator of the Environmental Social Science and Ecological Impacts (ESSEI) Working Group at University of Notre Dame. He currently serves as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame, where his research focuses on the social-ecological impacts of climate adaptation and mitigation efforts relating to agriculture and forests in Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a concentration in Natural Resources & Environmental Economics and Human Dimensions of the Environment. 

Before joining Notre Dame, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at UIUC, where he led quantitative research on climate smart agriculture (CSA) adoption in Malawi supported through a USAID project. Dr. Amadu works at the intersection of environment and development economics, natural resource management, and climate policy. He uses applied econometrics and geospatial techniques to analyze pressing human-environmental issues like climate adaptation & mitigation, sustainable agriculture, and food security in low and middle income countries especially across sub-Saharan Africa.

Specifically, Dr. Amadu's research is threefold. First, he studies the adoption of sustainable agricultural and environmental management practices like CSA in order to build knowledge and inform policy about such topics. An exemplar of this research is his publication in World Development wherein he developed a farm-level CSA typology to enhance scholarship and policy formulation about CSA adoption in diverse contexts. Second, he estimates biophysical impacts (e.g., soil health) and social-ecological impacts (e.g., grain yield and food security) of environmental conservation projects like watershed development and CSA efforts across smallholder farms in the face of climate change – as demonstrated by his publications in Agricultural Systems and Food Policy. Third, he analyzes the pathways through which agricultural development and environmental management programs like CSA interventions achieve impacts, as illustrated in work he has published in Climate Policy and Ecological Economics.