Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Kocks is researching the impact of Cuba's growing tourism industry on methods and patterns of local food production, particularly in urban areas. Anecdotal evidence supports competing claims on whether Cuban tourism has encouraged or hindered local food production, and he hopes to match environmental and economic data from the past decade to assess these effects empirically. His research combines two new data sets generated as part of his project: remote sensing data to quantify agricultural land area and food price data collected from private food markets in Havana. His work will help evaluate the full environmental effects of economic growth strategies that focus on tourism.