AAL_31 Alumni AudioLab with Sony Baral

Right during this podcast recording, Dr Sony Baral received the acceptation to be the first woman to take up a position as an associate professor at the Institute for Forestry at Thribhuvan University/Nepal. The OeAD warmly congratulates her!

Sony Baral grew up in rural Nepal, an area where forests play a major role for the population. They are the basis of life, living space, provide fuelwood for cooking and heating, and products to sell. On the other hand, especially cooking and heating with fuelwood is responsible for a large part of CO₂ emissions in the rural areas of Nepal. Sony Baral has devoted her academic career to these CO₂ emissions and the forests in Nepal in general.

In 2019 she completed her PhD at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, as a scholarship holder of the APPEAR program. In addition, she has been working repeatedly at the interface between science and policy making for many years. A work that encouraged her to study additionally law since 2018.

In this podcast she talks about forest management in Nepal, about the special features of so-called community forests and about the discrepancy between firewood as a necessity on the one hand and as a cause of CO₂ emissions on the other hand.