Sara Masia

Sara Masia completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Plant Production and Protection and a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Science at the University of Sassari (Italy) where she also completed her PhD in Agrometeorology and Ecophysiology of Agricultural and Forestry Ecosystems. Her PhD research focused on the assessment of the local and regional impact of climate change on crop water requirements in Mediterranean countries and on the assessment of irrigated agriculture vulnerability. Since 2017, she has been involved in project activities and education at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands.  From 2017 to 2020, her research was directly related to the Horizon 2020 project ‘SIM4NEXUS’ (Sustainable Integrated Management for the Nexus of Water-Energy-Food-Land-Climate for a resource-efficient Europe, https://sim4nexus.eu/ ). Her work focused on designing and developing System Dynamics Models from regional to global scale for 7 of the 12 case studies involved in the project, going from case study conceptualisation all the way to the delivery of results for a serious game. She was engaged in intense collaborations with the project case study leaders, with project thematic model experts, and with Serious Game developers. She is currently co-coordinating the DUPC2 WEF-Tools project (https://wef-tools.un-ihe.org) funded by the development cooperation agency of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She works together with project partners (e.g., GWP-SA, UKZN, WRC, IWMI, Waternet, etc), to explore opportunities and run activities aimed at supporting sustainable and inclusive socioeconomic development in SADC and MENA regions where the Water-Energy-Food nexus approach is at the core of development strategies and plans. She is currently working on the Horizon 2020 NEXOGENESIS project (Facilitating the next generation of effective and intelligent water-related policies utilising artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning to assess the water-energy-food-ecosystem (WEFE) nexus, https://nexogenesis.eu/) and Horizon Europe OnePlanet project (OpeN source nExus modelling tools for Planning sustainable Energy Transition in Africa, https://oneplanetproject.eu/) where she is involved in the qualitative and quantitative assessment of the WEFE nexus system at the basin scale in case studies located in Europe and in Africa. 

She joined the CMCC-IAFES (Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change - Impacts on Agriculture, Forests and Ecosystem Services division, https://www.cmcc.it/) division in Sassari in November 2021 working on the  PRIMA ACQUAOUNT (Adapting to Climate change by QUantifying optimal Allocation of water resOUrces and socio-ecoNomic inTerlinkages, https://mel.cgiar.org/projects/acquaount) project which aims at improving integrated water resource management through the development of innovative tools while contributing to climate resilience. 

Sara currently combines work at the IHE Delft with work at the CMCC foundation.