Maria Wang Mei Hua

Faculty of Science

Grantham Scholar

mariawang1990@gmail.com

Profile

Minimising ecological and social externalities in tropical crop expansion

Project

With growing demand for tropical agricultural products, including palm oil, rubber and wood-pulp, there is an urgent need to find sustainability between natural ecosystems, people and economics. Each crop has an emerging crop-specific sustainability initiative in varying degrees of development aimed at reducing the wider environmental and social damage they cause (negative externalities).

However, planning methods and resulting land-use plans of government resource-use agencies and industry rarely take into account competition between crops and agricultural externalities, which increases the conflicts between environment, society and different crop types for land.

Focusing on natural rubber in Southeast Asia and West Africa, our project aims to develop a spatial model for the expansion of rubber agriculture and simulate optimal landscape plans for multiple crops that maximize ecological, social and economic sustainability.

In addition, via collaboration with a network of commodity producer and purchaser companies, we hope to assess the most relevant ecological and social impacts of rubber agriculture and expansion, and analyse different ways of internalizing externalities.

Outreach and impact

Decolonising research guide for PhD researchers. Maria Wang Mei Hua and a team of Grantham Scholars made a guide to decolonising research. This guide is aimed at Grantham Scholars, but would be useful for all researchers. Maria and her group were shortlisted for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Postgraduate Student Diversity’ for their decolonisation work.

COP26

In 2021, Maria and a group of Grantham Scholars went to COP26 as official observers for the University of Sheffield. During COP Maria was interviewed by BBC Radio Sheffield.

Maria's sustainability work at The University of Sheffield

I am passionate about wider engagement beyond my department and my research. As part of a team of Grantham scholars tasked with producing an audit report to inform the University of Sheffield’s first Sustainability Strategy. We spent a few months in 2018 conducting the audit and writing a 50-page audit report.

I am also part of the Sustainability Committee at the Students’ Union, where we represent the student voice in the SU and at the University via different platforms. We organise events to engage students about sustainability issues (ranging from the injustice in fast fashion; debating a ban on meat sales at the SU; and social events to bring together sustainability-minded people), and campaign for changes at the university.

Blogs & interviews

Maria was interview by Mongabay (an award-winning, non-profit media outlet with over 110K followers on Twitter). She spoke to them about her report into rubber agroforestry (see in publications). You can read the interview here.