PhD student wins Climate Investment Challenge alongside teammates

Huge congratulations to Newcastle alumnus and current PhD student Will Ovenden (Zoology BSc, Wildlife Management) who has won the Climate Investment Challenge in London this year!  

The Climate Investment Challenge is a student-led competition hosted by Imperial College Business School and the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment, inviting students to devise financial solutions to climate challenges.

Will, alongside a group of MBA students at Alliance Manchester Business School, won the Emerging and Developing Markets Prize through their Project Miaro proposal. This prize calls on students to use innovative financial instruments or existing financial tools to address an underserved climate change issue within a specific emerging and developing market.

Find out more about this amazing win from Will.

Hi Will, thanks for speaking with us. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your current situation and time at Newcastle University? 

Can you tell us a little about the climate challenge and why you decided to take part? 

The Climate Investment Challenge is a student-led competition hosted by Imperial College Business School and the Centre for Climate Finance and Investment. It calls on students to find a financial solution to a climate challenge. Our proposal is Project Miaro, a blended microinsurance product which provides affordable insurance to households and channels investments into risk-reducing mitigation projects in Madagascar.

Throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate courses, I developed an interest in different climate-related challenges facing communities in various regions of the world. In the second year of my undergraduate degree, I decided I’d like to study for a PhD and pursue a career in research.

My interest in sustainable agriculture stems from a module I enjoyed during my MSc called Coupled Human-Natural Systems (CHANS), where I learned about the Agrisys Tanzania Project. Agrisys Tanzania, led by Professor Marion Pfeifer, focused on agriculture and restoration in the northern Kilombero Valley, Tanzania: ‘What to plant, When and Where?’. The landscape is a mosaic of agricultural land and protected areas, with sugarcane being the dominant cash crop.

The landscape is part of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania but also boasts extremely high ecological importance, with part of the Eastern Arc Mountains Global Biodiversity hotspot to the west.

Sustainability is a key theme of agriculture in the valley; farmers must increase their yields without increasing their inputs because they typically don’t have access to expensive fertilizers and pesticides, and there is a need to increase yield without damaging the wider landscape.

The solution is the vertical expansion of agriculture (or sustainable intensification), which in essence means increasing the output without increasing the need for more inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) or increasing the conversion of land to agriculture.

My research will provide insights into the potential yields that could be achieved under different management scenarios. Since starting the PhD, I have been fortunate enough to spend six months living in Tanzania during my field season and have since returned for a couple of trips to follow up with the farmers I worked with.

I entered the Climate Investment Challenge because of the opportunity to learn about the finance behind environmental projects. Throughout my studies, I have learned about the benefits of different nature-based solutions, but understanding how to make them financially sustainable represents a different challenge.

Can you tell us about Project Miaro and its life-changing impact? 

Madagascar experiences multiple tropical cyclones annually, and the economic damages of the last three major cyclones alone exceed $2.6 billion. Vulnerability to cyclones is high in Madagascar, with 97% of the population living in cyclone-exposed regions, and only 2.69% having any form of insurance. This is likely because infrastructure and affordability represent two major barriers to rolling out insurance products.

Miaro (‘protection’ in Malagasy) is unlike other insurance products; it uses government subsidies to increase financial inclusion in insurance and aims to reduce payout of premiums over time by investing in risk-reducing mitigation projects, like seawalls and mangrove restoration projects.

The challenge is creating value for multiple stakeholders involved so the project is financially viable. The value of Miaro at the household level is affordable insurance, helping to kickstart livelihoods following a cyclone; reducing the costs of damages caused by cyclones at the government level, which frees up funds for other developmental initiatives; and providing a 5% annual coupon for impact investors (as well as a social return), which ensures the project does not require a blank cheque from philanthropists.

Can you tell us about the prize you won?

Do you have any future plans you would like to share? 

Project Miaro is at the beginning of what we hope will be a very successful journey. Over the coming months, while we complete our respective studies, we will continue to communicate with our network in Madagascar and the insurance industry to receive feedback on our product, develop a roadmap to implementation, and seek investment to get Miaro off the ground. To aid this process we have recently begun an exciting project working with 180 Degrees Consulting, a not-for-profit which helps early-stage start-ups like Miaro scale up their impact and business operations.

Yasar and I were also honoured to represent Miaro on NinetyOne’s ‘Sustainability with Substance’ podcast, which will be published in September on their Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast channels.

Can you please share your favourite memories from your time at Newcastle? 

My time at Newcastle University has been memorable. The undergraduate and postgraduate courses allowed me to travel to various different countries to complement my learning experience, including field trips to Thailand and Crete.

The modules consist of lectures on current ongoing research delivered by world-leading academics and workshops and lab classes which offer the opportunity to learn skills that you’ll need in your future career.

Newcastle is a small and friendly city with plenty to do in the city centre and a stunning coastline only a short metro trip away. Some of my favourite memories in Newcastle however are from Leazes stand at St James’ Park. My first experience was a 3-1 win against Brentford back in 2016 and since the takeover the atmosphere around the city on matchdays has been unbelievable, particularly on Champions League nights.

Finally, what one bit of advice would you give to somebody who has recently graduated from Newcastle?

The one bit of advice I would give recent graduates (and current students for that matter) is to take every opportunity presented to network and meet new people from different career paths. Networking allows the exchange of ideas and can help you progress your career through learning from the experience of others further along a career path you may wish to go down. That includes reaching out/staying in contact with academic staff at Newcastle. In both Project Miaro and my own academic career, I have been fortunate to receive a great deal of support from several academics at Newcastle University and so would strongly encourage taking advantage of their support and general desire for us to succeed.

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