The NWO project CERRADO, a four-year project with a total budget of €935,000, brings together an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, ecologists, and practitioners from four universities and four NGOs in Brazil and the Netherlands. Fabio de Castro will lead the project together with Mercedes Bustamante from the University of Brasília (Brazil).

‘The Brazilian Cerrado region has been most severely affected – both ecologically and socially – by the expansion of industrial agriculture’, says De Castro. ‘This project will investigate the role of small-scale farming and sociobiodiversity production systems in sustaining key ecological function – including water regulation, pollination, biodiversity conservation, and climate regulation – while promoting territorial and socioeconomic justice for local producers and traditional communities.’

European islands as testbeds

The EU Horizon project IslandDecade is a three-year project that involves eleven partner institutions. The project will help coastal and island communities turn ocean science from the UN Ocean Decade into practical decisions, policies, and local capacity-building.

‘Using European islands as testbeds, this project will design and test new governance tools and partnerships so that Ocean Decade initiatives can be adopted, scaled up, and sustained well beyond 2030,’ says De Castro. CEDLA/UvA is a consortium partner in the project and has been allocated €270,000 to contribute to activities related to the project’s participatory methodology and its Global South perspective.

Both projects will support one PhD and one postdoc position under supervision of Fabio de Castro. The projects will also create synergies with De Castro’s current NWO-funded project LINKAGES, that focuses on small-scale production systems in the Amazon.