GeoField Convening 2023
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Panel Discussion Organized by Mathematica

GeoField 2023 Convening Video Playlist (Youtube)

The GeoField 2023 Convening, held at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in Rome, Italy, brought together 100 experts in impact evaluation, Earth Observation (the use of technologies and techniques to monitor planet Earth remotely, often from space), and development program implementation.

Panel Discussion Organized by Mathematica
Speakers/Panelist

Tulika Narayan (Mathematica)
Juan Bonilla (AIR)
Tomoko Harigaya (Precision Development)
Johanne Pelletier (Standing Panel on Impact Assessment)
Sean Luna McAdams (CEGA, UC Berkeley)
Anthony D'Agostino (Mathematica)
Moderator: Tulika Narayan (Mathematica)

This panel discussions brings together evaluators, remote sensing experts, data science experts to elucidate the key challenges faced by evaluators in the use of remote sensing to measure agricultural outcomes and resilience; discuss some of the best practices, tools, and data sources that can resolve those challenges; and contribute to longer-term efforts through GeoField to consolidate guidance materials and recommendations to effectively integrate satellite data in resilience-focused research.

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Speakers and Presenters in this Video

Tulika Narayan
Mathematica
Climate Change Practice Lead

Dr. Narayan leads Mathematica's climate change practice at the enterprise level, leveraging a team equipped with expertise across multiple sectors and experience across the globe, to design solutions at the intersection of policy, data, and technology to address climate change. Dr. Narayan has more than 20 years of experience conducting economic analysis and evaluations to support agriculture, climate change, and environmental policy. She remains laser-focused on applying principles of economic theory and behavioral economics on data to sharpen the impact of programs and policies. Her research aims to identify sustainable, cost-effective, and just policies and programs that address underlying market failures and behavioral constraints and consider distributional and equity considerations.

Tomoko Harigaya
Precision Development (PxD)
Chief Economist and Director of Research

Tomoko Harigaya is the Chief Economist and Director of Research at Precision Development, a non-profit that harnesses the power of technology, data science, and behavioral economics to provide targeted information to farmers in low- and middle-income countries. She coordinates PxD's effort in using scientific insights to design, iterate, and scale services that empower smallholder farmers to increase their income and evaluating their cost-effectiveness. Tomoko has over 15 years of experience working with public and private sector partners in innovation and evaluation research in development.

Johanne Pelletier
CGIAR Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA)
Consultant

Dr. Johanne Pelletier is a quantitative ecologist/environmental scientist with expertise in remote sensing. She works as a consultant for the CGIAR Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) where advises on and integrates Earth Observations into the research portfolio. Her research interest focuses on understanding of the impacts of human interactions with terrestrial ecosystems through land-use/cover change and agriculture, with the goal of mitigating climate change, sustaining ecosystem services and improving livelihoods. She earned her PhD at McGill University (Canada) and with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama). She played a leadership role on a NASA-funded project focusing on improving estimates of carbon emissions and removals from land-cover change in Southern and Eastern Africa as a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. She was selected for a highly competitive NatureNet Fellowship by the Nature Conservancy at Cornell University, where she worked with agricultural and development economists studying the relationship between deforestation and the use of agricultural inputs by smallholder farmers and led a collaborative partnership project of TNC-Cornell Atkinson Sustainability Center on soil mitigation potentials and the energy sector (charcoal production) in Zambia.

Anthony D'Agostino
Mathematica
Senior Researcher

Dr. Anthony Louis D'Agostino is a Senior Researcher in Mathematica's International unit where he leads independent evaluations for clients including the Millennium Challenge Corporation, USAID, the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, the Childrens Investment Fund Foundation, and the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services. He is an applied microeconomist who uses survey, administrative, and satellite data to support evidence-based decision-making in a range of development, environmental, and climate policy areas. His current project portfolio covers using cost-benefit analysis to catalyze sustainable land-use investments, leveraging satellite data to measure the economic returns to irrigation, assessing the effects of air quality monitoring infrastructure on civil society, and estimating the causal impact of factory farms on antimicrobial resistance. He holds a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, an MPP from the National University of Singapore, and prior to joining Mathematica was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment.

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The GeoField community of practice  is a space for impact evaluators, remote sensing experts, and field organizations to brainstorm and problem solve about how Earth observation can lead to program insights that solve real world, long-running challenges of climate adaptation and agricultural development.
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