MSU Scholar Emilio Moran and His Colleagues Are “Rethinking Hydropower”

<p>Moran’s true discipline is asking the right questions and merging human and environmental sciences to get a holistic understanding of some of the world’s most crucial problems—climate change, land use—and a project he pioneered some 30 years ago: determining the potential of the humid tropics for intensive agriculture. </p><p><a href="https://research.msu.edu/msu-rethinks-hydropower-with-2-6m-nsf-grant/">Moran</a> is a <a href="https://msu.edu/honoredfaculty/hannah-professors/directory.html?cat1=john-a-hannah-distinguished-professors">John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor</a> with the <a href="http://geo.msu.edu/">Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences</a>, the <a href="http://www.globalchange.msu.edu/">Center for Global Change and Earth Observations</a>, the <a href="https://espp.msu.edu/">Environmental Science and Policy Program</a>, the <a href="https://clacs.isp.msu.edu/">Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies</a>, and the <a href="https://www.canr.msu.edu/csis/">Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability</a> at Michigan State University.</p><p>“I've been working for several decades, mostly in the Amazon, and Africa, too. I've worked on agriculture and what is known as land use and demographic change, migration and demography. My work is probably best known for, for the first time, using remote sensing to examine very small fields in farms to understand how people make decisions about how much rain forest to cut and how much to cultivate. And I’ve studied what happens after you deforest the rainforest.”</p><p>Moran’s <a href="https://research.msu.edu/msu-interdisciplinary-team-secures-3-2m-grant-to-empower-off-grid-communities/">latest work</a> centers around the environmental and economic impact of hydroelectric dams in Brazil.</p><p>“We have found there are many dimensions to this work. The turbine is the thing we want to deliver at the end, something very practical and usable that people can be given for their energy use. How can we serve off-grid communitie