Fallah Nyumah, PH.D (C)
My name is Fallah Nyumah, and I am from Liberia, a tropical country with high forest cover and a rich cultural diversity in Africa. I am currently a PhD student in Forestry at the Institute of Forest Conservation, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto. I am a graduate of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Sustainable Forest and Nature Management, jointly awarded by the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and Bangor University (United Kingdom).
Agricultural expansion, particularly the rapid development of monoculture plantations in tropical Africa, poses significant challenges to the sustainability of tropical forest ecosystems. While crops such as oil palm and rubber play a crucial role in economic development, their expansion can also have adverse implications for forest resources, climate resilience, and local people’s livelihoods. So, the central question guiding my curiosity is “How can monoculture plantations’ productivity be balanced with sustainable forest management under climate uncertainty and variability in socioeconomic and forest resource values? My research addresses this question through the lens of the three pillars of sustainability: ecological, social, and economic. Specifically, I am focusing on integrating socioeconomic and ecological values into the Sustainable management of Oil Palm and Rubber Plantations in Tropical Liberia under global change, using plant physiological principles, system modeling, and optimization approaches under the supervision of Professor Rasoul Yousefpour. By integrating ecological and socioeconomic values, my research seeks to address the existing knowledge gaps in optimal plantation management and to develop an integrated decision support system that will promote the long-term sustainability and resilience of monoculture plantation systems. In addition, I am also interested in the power dynamics, participatory forest governance, and institutional arrangements of land-use transitions, particularly the transformation of tropical forest ecosystems into plantations.