2025 Panama _ Climate-Smart Food-Energy-Water Nexus
2025 PANAMA Student Trip
Dr. Dilip Nandwani (Co-PI), Sara Mulville (Program Manager) and five CFEWS students traveled to Panama to learn about circular agriculture and research-stakeholder engagements in Panama. Students explore these concepts under different ecological and socio-economic settings. Our itinerary included impactful visits that gave students a deeper understanding of Panama’s rich biodiversity, innovation in sustainability, and community resilience. Field visits provided examples of how circularity is adopted by indigenous and non-indigenous smallholders in coffee, cacao, rice and yucca. The group visit the farm plots for producers in the Indigenous Comarca Kuna de Madugandí and the Association of Coffee Producers of the Ciri and Trinidad Rivers Sub-basin with producers that receive training and economic inputs from the Sustainability Division at the Panama Canal Authority Agency. Other visits included the Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá (UTP) – Main Campus and the Tocumen Campus labs, gaining insights into cutting-edge research, environmental tech, and collaborative opportunities with local students and faculty. For stakeholder-research engagements students visit with leaders at Fundación Natura Panama and Juan Díaz WWTP Wastewater Treatment Plant – to learn about large scale waste-to-energy and waste-to-fertilize management and operation. Esri Panamá – Students also learned about ESRI collaboration with indigenous comarcas on the adoption of geospatial technologies for forest management. Our itinerary included impactful visits that gave us a deeper understanding of Panama’s rich biodiversity, innovation in sustainability, and community resilience.
One Health: clean water for development. Training the Next Global One Health Workforce: An Educational OH Pilot Program for Cross-Sectoral Engagement in Darien, Panama.
For the 2023 January Term, students from different disciplines explored the importance of working across multiple industries to address clean water and sanitation. Drs. Jennifer Retherford, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Adam Willcox, research associate professor in the School of Natural Resources, Nan Gaylord, associate dean of practice and global affairs in the College of Nursing, and Sara Mulville, FEWSUS program manager, led a group made up of engineering, agriculture, and nursing students. This trip was funded by the UT one Healdh Group visited Technological University of Panama, University of Panama (Nursing) to meet faculty conducting research in water quality in urban and peri-urban systems. The trip culminated with a visit to Embera-Wounaan indigenous groups in the outskirts of Panama City. Root causes of waterborne illnesses were evaluated within the context of the Emberá-Wounaan comarcas.
