A. Baseline Ethnographic Research

Baseline ethnographic research includes communities meetings, interviews, focus groups, participant observation, household surveys, and documentary video.

B. Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA) or argan oil production

E-LCA involves the cradle to grave environmental impact of a process or product (US EPA, 1998).

C. Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA)

A Social-Life Cycle Assessment can be performed. S-LCA is “...a social impact assessment technique that aims to assess the social and socio-economic aspects of products and their potential positive and negative impacts along their lifecycle…” from extraction of materials, processing, distribution, use, and disposal (SETAC LCI, 2009)

D. Geospatial analysis of the argan forest

Dr. Naughton will advise an IRES student to create a land suitability map of argan trees in Morocco and another IRES student will apply climate change models to this map to see potential changes.

E. Designing appropriate argan oil technologies

IRES students will evaluate current technologies based on their environmental and social differences compared to manual processing quantified from Research Thrusts A-C, and then potentially develop improvements to existing technologies and/or design new technologies with local stakeholders.

F. Environmental and socially sustainable and equitable systems

Research thrusts A-E are separated but they are interdependent. Though IRES students may focus on an individual research thrust, they will all be trained in ethnographic research methods (the basis of research thrusts B-F) and exposed to the other methods and tools by interacting with the other IRES students in their cohorts.