Jan Rafter is an MSc student on NUI Galway’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme, which is in partnership with the international CCAFS CGIAR Research Programme. She graduated in 2011 with a BAI in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a civil and geotechnical engineer for multi-national engineering companies in New Zealand and the United Kingdom on a variety of wastewater and infrastructure projects. During this time her interest in climate change, sustainability and food security grew and she returned to Ireland in 2017 to further her knowledge through third level study and work towards a career in this sector.
She has a keen interest in sustainability, carbon footprinting, and life-cycle assessments of agricultural systems and how these can contribute to mitigation of climate change. For her thesis research she will be working with the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Vietnam to estimate the carbon impact of cocoa farming in Lampung and Sulawesi provinces in Indonesia. The work will involve using remote sensing methods to classify cocoa in the landscape and cocoa-related deforestation, which will then be combined with field data to estimate carbon stock contained in cocoa systems.
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