Full Name
Dr. Erika Styger
Business or Org Name
Cornell University
Title
Professor of Practice
Speaker Bio
Erika Styger is a tropical agronomist concentrating her work on the global scaling up of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a climate-resilient agronomic method, which targets to increase rice productivity, while adapting to climate change, regenerating soils, reducing agro-chemical use, and saving irrigation water by 50% leading to 50% reduced methane emissions.
Dr Styger has worked in 30 countries on SRI and is the lead technical advisor to the 13-country West Africa project RICOWAS, the largest SRI scaling-up project to date. She provides technical trainings to national Master Trainers, and teams up with partners to identify and amplify innovative, locally-adapted rice production practices. This approach was implemented for the first time in the 2010s in West Africa reaching 50,000 smallholders, and now with RICOWAS targeting 150,000 smallholders by 2027.
In 2024, Styger co-founded the initiative ClimateRice together with CarbonFarm Technology. ClimateRice leverages carbon-financing to create a self-financing model to scale-up SRI. The team plans to implement this mechanism across multiple countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over the next 10 years.
Additionally, Styger has worked since 2020 with the NGO Jubilee Justice to develop regenerative, organic rice production systems for specialty rices with Black farmers in the southern USA. She also leads an ethnographic and genetic study of rice diversity managed by Maroons in Suriname, and collaborates with farming communities in semi-arid Mali to improve their fonio (Digitaria exilis) agronomy.
Erika Styger is a Professor of Practice in tropical agronomy and the Director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program in the Department of Global Development. She has a PhD in Crop and Soil Sciences from Cornell University and a MSc in Agronomy from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ).
Other than Cornell, she has worked for the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the United Nation agencies the World Bank, FAO and UNDP, for US consulting firms (Chemonics, DAI, and Abt Associates), and the international NGOs (Africare, CRS and the MDG Alliance).
Dr Styger has worked in 30 countries on SRI and is the lead technical advisor to the 13-country West Africa project RICOWAS, the largest SRI scaling-up project to date. She provides technical trainings to national Master Trainers, and teams up with partners to identify and amplify innovative, locally-adapted rice production practices. This approach was implemented for the first time in the 2010s in West Africa reaching 50,000 smallholders, and now with RICOWAS targeting 150,000 smallholders by 2027.
In 2024, Styger co-founded the initiative ClimateRice together with CarbonFarm Technology. ClimateRice leverages carbon-financing to create a self-financing model to scale-up SRI. The team plans to implement this mechanism across multiple countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over the next 10 years.
Additionally, Styger has worked since 2020 with the NGO Jubilee Justice to develop regenerative, organic rice production systems for specialty rices with Black farmers in the southern USA. She also leads an ethnographic and genetic study of rice diversity managed by Maroons in Suriname, and collaborates with farming communities in semi-arid Mali to improve their fonio (Digitaria exilis) agronomy.
Erika Styger is a Professor of Practice in tropical agronomy and the Director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program in the Department of Global Development. She has a PhD in Crop and Soil Sciences from Cornell University and a MSc in Agronomy from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ).
Other than Cornell, she has worked for the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the United Nation agencies the World Bank, FAO and UNDP, for US consulting firms (Chemonics, DAI, and Abt Associates), and the international NGOs (Africare, CRS and the MDG Alliance).
Speaking At
