Tom Smucker
The Sustainable Administration Hub is led by Dr. Tom Smucker, Professor of Geography within the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Smucker is a geographer who specializes in environment-development interactions in East Africa. His areas of teaching specialization include human geography, food systems and food security, the human dimensions of global environmental change, and theories of international development. A primary concern of his research has been to understand the interplay of local agency, local knowledge systems, and external political economy factors in shaping vulnerability and resilience of African dryland farming and herding-based livelihood systems to climatic variability and change. He served as a Contributing Author on the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability), contributing to a regional vulnerability synthesis based on the risk framework of AR6 that includes risk from climate responses and recognizes the interactions among the drivers of risk.