Team

Much of my research has focused on the development and use of decision support tools (simulation and cost benefit assessment models) for managing pests and diseases in agriculture: cotton in Egypt; cocoa in Costa Rica (Leach, Krauss and Mumford, 2001) and Indonesia; coffee in India, Mexico and Colombia; vegetables in Malaysia and Tanzania; protein marketing in Bangladesh; citrus fruit in the Mediterranean basin (Cleanfruit  – EC Framework 6 project). Part of the Cleanfruit project was spent developing a tool, the Pesticide Environmental Accounting (PEA) software (Leach and Mumford, 2008), to monetize the undesirable effects of pesticide applications in fruit orchards used against fruit flies.  Putting € signs to human health and environmental impacts makes it possible to perform cost benefit analysis of replacing pesticides with alternative technologies (Sterile Insect Technique) and gives decision makers a more tangible basis for policy development.  The PEA has been subsequently developed to apportion human health and environmental impacts to individual pesticides in (€/hectare) to Desert Locust controls in West Africa (Leach, Mullié, Mumford and Waibel, 2009). Environmental Policy, Imperial College London focuses on, among other things, environmental risk and how it affects decision making and policy.  As part of the NNRAP project John Mumford and I developed a stochastic model to assess the moneterized impacts of non-native species introductions to the UK.  The Invasive Risk Impact Simulator (IRIS) has the facility to include the assessor’s confidence in the data being entered.  Different degrees of confidence / uncertainty affect the decisions that policy makers take so capturing this could improve the robustness of policy decisions that emerge.