Abigail Croker joined the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Levin Lab in the Fall of 2024 within the Earth Resilience and Sustainability Initiative, developing collaborations with the Stockholm Resilience Center and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. She is completing her Ph.D. at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, funded by Grantham Institute’s Science and Solutions for Changing Planet Doctoral Training Partnership (SSCP DTP).  She is also affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society.  Abigail’s research applies a social-ecological systems framework to explore the opportunities for and challenges of decentralizing fire management across East and Southern African savanna-protected areas under future climate-socioeconomic change.  Her research takes a historical institutionalist and ecological approach to understand how multiple systems variables interact to affect resilience in complex adaptive savanna ecosystems, integrating fieldwork, empirical research approaches, and systems modelling.  

Her research will explore the relationships between the introduction of carbon market mechanisms aiming to mitigate wildfires and increase natural carbon sequestration, and the expansion of agricultural frontiers across highly biodiverse tropical mesic savanna-forest transition zones.  Three interrelated challenges occurring in these ecosystems are central to this investigation: (i) the emergence of a ‘wildfire paradox’ across conservation landscapes where delineated land use boundaries separate human and livestock populations and fire suppression operations have been implemented; (ii) an increase in carbon-oriented results-based payment schemes in wildfire and conservation management interventions which often prioritize carbon revenue generation at the national level; (iii) the rapid expansion of agri-business frontiers where annual rainfall supports crop production. Abigail will be working with Professor Simon Levin, Professor Daniel Rubenstein, Professor Jonathan Levine, and others, to investigate how these challenges play out in local agrarian contexts and their long-term impacts on savanna health and biodiversity, natural carbon capture, and social-ecological resilience.