Jurgens, Sharona

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PhD Candidate SISSTEM (Junior Researcher & Junior Lecturer)
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Chemical Analysis
Green Chemistry
Physical Chemistry
Polymer Pyrolysis
Thermodynamics
Reaction Kinetics
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Last updated November 7, 2024
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Sharona Jurgens is a junior lecturer at the University of Aruba and simultaneously a doctoral student at the Catholic University Leuven (KU Leuven). She has a background in Earth Sciences. Her doctoral research is titled Spatial Analysis of Urban Metabolism in Small Island States and is focused on the interaction between society, nature, and the economy.

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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Are there limits to growth of tourism on the Caribbean islands? Case-study Aruba
    (Frontiers, 2024) Jurgens, Sharona; Mijts, Eric; Van Rompaey, Anton
    Mass tourism is a major driver of economic growth in the Caribbean. One major trade-off of this economic growth model is the loss of natural areas due to tourism activities and increasing urbanization. Aruba is one of the most tourist intense destinations within the region with a total of 1.1million stay-over tourists in 2019. Moreover, this island has one of the largest population densities in the Caribbean and high-speed urbanization takes place in this formerly rural island state. Therefore, this study aims to assess the islands’ carrying capacity in relation to its limited land resources by means of a geospatial methodological analysis coupled with a correlation analysis between socio-economic indicators and statistics. First, the past and present drivers and characteristics of urbanization are analyzed. Second, the correlation between socio-economic indicators and the number of tourists was assessed. Third, two future scenarios were developed to assess the maximum carrying capacity. From 1986 till 2020, Aruba’s built environment increased from ∼29–60 km2 and translates to one-third of the island. Expansion was characterized by sprawl in the earlier years and changed to infilling in the latter. Furthermore, the results indicate that all socio-economic indicators are strongly positive correlated to tourism. Lastly, the possible maximum physical carrying capacity for yearly visitors and number of inhabitants was calculated to be∼1.7million and 150.000, respectively.We conclude that the proposed methodological framework is robust and adequate to serve as a low budget decision-making tool for sustainable tourism development on islands.
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    Mapping for Sustainable Development: Comparing different mapping techniques for monitoring mangroves to reach SDG 15 and 6
    (2024-09-09) Ricker, Britta; Eppinga, Maarten; Jurgens, Sharona; Mijts, Eric
    Mapping the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is necessary to identify where to place localized interventions to meet these goals. The UN Statistics Agency is responsible for establishing and curating SDG indicator data to measure how close or far each country is to achieving the goals. Each UN member state may voluntarily share their SDG indicator data as a form of data sovereignty. While the value of mapping the SDGs is clear, governments are not urged to collect or share spatial data for mapping the SDGs. Many countries with the most missing SDG data are islands, some of the most vulnerable countries (Gosling-Goldsmith et al., 2020). SDG indicators related to the environment can be challenging to collect and require localized data collection strategies, otherwise valuable and vulnerable ecosystems may risk being missed from data collection efforts (Hák et al., 2016; Kulonen et al., 2019).