Professor Patricia Howard
About
Patricia is an Emeritus Professor at Wageningen University and Honorary Professor at the University of Kent since 2007, as well as Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 6 for IPBES Global Alien Invasive Species Assessment. She teaches on the Ethnobotany MSc and has supervised MSc and PhD students at Kent since 2007.
Patricia has extensive academic as well as practical experience in socio-ecological systems research and biodiversity, natural resource management, agriculture, environment, and development. She has a multidisciplinary background in Sociology, Anthropology (with a specialisation in Ethnobiology and Gender Studies) and Political Economy, and considers herself to be a Political Ecologist. Her career has been devoted to two efforts: one is to understand and develop conceptual frameworks around the drivers of poverty and vulnerability, biodiversity management and degradation from local to global scales in both traditional and capitalist societies, and the second is to incorporate such understanding and frameworks into the efforts of development organisations to effect positive change. The trajectory of her work has spanned three world regions: North America, Mesoamerica and Europe, and she has also gained experience in research and supervision in several African contexts.
She spent 15 years working in the United Nations system in development efforts, including development programming, evaluation, and policy development (mainly with the FAO, but as well with UNDP, IFAD, ILO, and UNFPA). For much of her career, she has concentrated on the following variables and their interrelationships, at one time focusing on one subset, and at another on another subset, with the goal of eventually integrating all: global markets, biodiversity, climate change, livestock, energy, socio-ecological systems, and resource management andequity in traditional societies, from both ethnobiological and political ecology perspectives. She has had the opportunity to develop, together with other colleagues, a scientific conceptual framework for an innovative global programme spearheaded by FAO, called the Globally Ingenious Agricultural Heritage Programme (GIAHS). Since 2008, she has led a research effort on Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change (funded by ESPA). She recenlty published a global literature review dealing with Human Adaptation to Invasive Species, and Human Dimensions of Invasive Species for a Special Issue of Ambio on Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change.
Howard, P., Pecl, G., Puri, R.K., and Thornton, T. F., eds. 2019. Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change in the Anthropocene. Special Issue Ambio 48(12).
Howard, P. 2019. Human adaptation to invasive species: A conceptual framework based on a case study metasynthesis. Ambio 48, 1401–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-019-01297-5