Marthe Wens is an Assistant Professor in the Water and Climate Risk group. Her research concerns water security and societal impacts, with a specific focus on simulating the intertwined nature of drought risk and human adaptive behaviour. Most of her work focuses on Europe or Africa, and on agricultural droughts, but recently her work is broader and includes drought impacts on other sectors (e.g. ecosystems) and aspects of society (e.g. children, migration). She investigates the use of agent-based modelling and machine learning tools to create global, national, and local drought profiles to support disaster risk reduction efforts and is working on a project to enable the co-creation of green adaptation pathways to mitigate drought and flood risk.
She is a climate activist, nature-lover and enjoys working on climate resilience projects together with partner institutes from the Global South.

2016: Master of Science in Geography, Major Earth & Climate studies,
Minor: GIS and Spatial Modelling

(KU Leuven and VUB Brussels, Belgium)

Wens, M. (2016). Cost-benefit evaluation of soil and water conservation techniques in Tigray.
MSc thesis including 3 months fieldwork executing Choice Experiment and SWC surveys on field

Marthe is developing a socio-hydrologic agent-based model to simulate how the intertwined human-nature might evolve under given governance (i.e. socioeconomic situation), culture (i.e. farmers’ risk perception) and infrastructure (i.e. access to index-based insurance products), while explicitly including the emergent decision behaviour of stakeholders (i.e. of smallholder farmers). By modelling water security and food production as the outcome of a coupled human-natural system that accounts for human adaptability to external drivers, predictions about the impact of future droughts on agriculture can be improved. Besides, the model will be able to evaluate viable drought risk mitigation solutions that address short-term and long-term water scarcity challenges hence can serve as a support tool for the development of strategic drought risk management.

No ancillary activities

Ancillary activities are updated daily

2016 – Jan 2017: Monitoring and Evaluation Intern International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), Amman, Jordan.