Freddie Draper wins Leeds University Postgraduate Researcher of the Year

Many congratulations to Freddie Draper who won the Leeds University Postgraduate Researcher of the Year award on the 8th December.

This year’s awards focussed on the actual and potential impact of research; Freddie’s work, focussed on mapping and understanding the distribution of peat and biodiversity in Amazonian swamps has been used as the science basis for a new $6 million conservation project in Peru. This new investment is the first project to be funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF; www.greenclimate.fund/home), the major international funding mechanism that has been created to fund mitigation and adaptation to climate change in developing countries.

The project will promote and develop sustainable ‘bio-businesses’, including sustainable palm fruit harvesting, with indigenous communities along the Pastaza and Morona rivers of the northern Peruvian Amazon. The GCF funding for this initiative is justified on the basis that these activities will protect the high peatland carbon stocks of the region – which were calculated based on Freddie’s work. The potential impact of Freddie’s work is, however, even larger. The location of this successful GCF proposal is only on the fringes of mapped peat deposits and does not include the areas with the highest carbon stocks.

The overall aim of on-going work with supervisors Tim Baker, Katy Roucoux and Ian Lawson is to support the development of sustainable protected areas across the whole of this peatland complex - an area of currently largely undisturbed tropical rain forest that is equivalent to the size of England.