On October 1, three new members joined our team in the Environmental Economics department.

Dr. Franziska Gaupp holds a M.Sc. in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and a B.Sc. in Economics from the Free University of Berlin. She then completed her PhD at Oxford University on the topic of climate and water risks in the global granaries. Franziska has been researching climate risks and food system transformation for over 10 years and was Senior Guest Scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Director of the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC). In her work at the University of Osnabrück, she deals with the question of the role of inner perception (e.g. values, mindset) in sustainability transformation.

Ronald Walusimbi holds a M.Sc. in Agricultural and Applied Economics and a B.Sc. in Agriculture from Makerere University in Uganda. He was an Erasmus+ Framework Program 2022 scholarship holder at Justus Liebig University in Germany, an African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) scholarship holder and a BHEARD Innovation Scholars Program scholarship holder through the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) at Makerere University. Ronald has also spent more than 10 years as an agricultural extension officer advising smallholder farmers and applying participatory approaches to project evaluation with beneficiaries as an agricultural project coordinator. Ronald is now a PhD student in the Department of Environmental Economics at UOS and part of the DFG-funded research group “Ecological Regime Shifts and Systemic Risk in Coupled Social-Ecological Systems-ECORISK”.

Henriette Figueroa holds a M.Sc. in Resource and Environmental Economics from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and a B.Sc. in Energy Economics from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. In her research, she investigates how farmers perceive regime shifts and how their behavior is affected by undesirable regime shifts. An increased understanding of farmers' behavior in the face of these changes is essential to prevent undesirable and potentially irreversible consequences for the provision of ecosystem services. Henriette is a PhD student at the Chair of Environmental Economics and also part of the interdisciplinary DFG-funded research group “ECORISK”.