James W Hawkins

James holds a PhD in Environmental Science from the Lancaster Environment Centre (UK, 2021). His expertise lies in the use of quantitative tools such as life cycle assessment and process-based crop and livetock simulation models for sustainability assessment in agricultural production systems. Prior to his work in tropical livestock systems he worked on temperate-climate dairy production systems (Canada). 

James' work is transdisciplinary and links hierarchical components of agricultural systems: grass, cropland, agroforestry, livestock, extending from plot to national scale. He holds a MSc. in Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics from the University of Guelph (Canada), and has held research assistant and postdoc positions at IFPRI-CGIAR (USA) and CIFOR-ICRAF (Kenya & UK). He has held joint postdoctoral and assistant lecturer positions at Lancaster Environment Centre and Technical University Munich, where he taught courses on global livestock production systems and data science for agricultural systems. 

Based at ILRI-Mazingira, he contributes to the design and development of systems tools for sustainability assessment in tropical livestock systems, with a key focus on greenhouse gas quantification and mitigation and climate adaptation. He also contributes to the design and management of data collection and processing protocols and is the administrator for the newly developed tropical feed composition database.