News

On 14 September 17 fellows graduated from the annual six-month training programme at UNU-LRT. The graduation of the 10 women and 7 men was celebrated with a ceremony at the Keldnaholt research campus of the Agricultural University of Iceland. Two of the graduating fellows came from Tajikistan, a new UNU-LRT partner country. Other fellows from Asia came from Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and fellows from Africa came from Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, and Uganda.

The UNU-LRT fellows in this years’ six-month training programme are finalizing their research projects these days. They have been working on their projects for the last months under the supervision of specialists from various institutes and organizations in Iceland. This week they presented their research findings in an open seminar at the research campus of the Agricultural University of Iceland.

An important part of the training in the UNU-LRT six-month training programme are field excursions where the fellows learn about land degradation challenges, successes and failures in land restoration, and discuss with local people working in the field. Last week the fellows were on an excursion in the North of Iceland where they visited diverse sites revealing how land condition has been improved with various innovative solutions, often under harsh conditions.

Mongolia has an unparalleled monitoring programme on rangeland health. A wealth of data is collected every year in a systematic way, at many sites throughout this vast country. The high-quality data collected provides opportunities to communicate and synthesize this knowledge, so that it can be translated into effective policy making for sustainable rangeland use.

The main international lecturer at UNU-LRT this year is Dr Richard Thomas, Scientific Coordinator of ELD (the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative) and Consultant to ICARDA (International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas). Dr Thomas has vast experience in managing and implementing research projects on natural resources management and a great deal of his work has been on strengthening managerial and institutional capacity by building networks between scientists from many parts of the world, including Africa, Asia and Latin America.

A new paper on sheep grazing and Icelandic ecosystems has been recently published in the journal Land Degradation & Development. The paper “The sheep in wolf’s clothing? Recognizing threats for land degradation in Iceland using state‐and‐transition models” is led by Isabel C Barrio, project manager at UNU-LRT and co-authored by several UNU-LRT lecturers.