News

UNU-LRT welcomed two guest lecturers from UNU-EHS in Bonn last week, Dr Julia Kloos and Dr Zita Sebesvari. They gave lectures on ecosystems and disaster risk reduction, emphasising the link between social and ecological systems and how disaster risks can be reduced by sustainable management, conservation and ecosystem restoration. Throughout those sessions the UNU-LRT fellows worked in groups on several case studies to identify the different components of disaster risk, such as exposure and vulnerability, and to identify ecosystem services and beneficiaries.

Last week, Dr Jeffrey Herrick, a renowned soil scientist from the Jornada Research Unit, USDA-ARS, New Mexico (USA), gave lectures and hands-on training to the fellows in the six-month training programme. In his teaching, he focused on the Global Land-Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS), which is being developed and will allow the potential of land to be defined.

On 7-15 May, the UNU-LRT Director went on a fact-finding mission to Lesotho in Southern Africa. The mission was a response to a collaboration interest of the government of Lesotho on combating land degradation and restoring degraded land.

The UNU-LRT six-month training programme for 2015 started on 10 March. 13 fellows, seven women and six men from seven countries and two continents, participate in the training programme this year. The fellows from Central Asia are five, two from Kyrgyzstan and tree from Mongolia. From Sub-Saharan Africa the fellows come from Ghana (1 fellow), Ethiopia (2), Uganda (2), Malawi (2) and Namibia (1). This is the largest group that has participated in the training programme since it was launched in 2007.

An Advisor of Agriculture and Rural Development at the World Bank, Dr Erick Fernandes, together with Professor Kevin Anderson, paid UNU-LRT a visit on 3 March. Both of them have been involved in work and research on climate change. Dr Fernandes has been working with the World Bank for 18 years and is currently developing and operationalizing a multi-sector framework and quantitative modelling approach to enhance landscape-level resilience to climate change. It includes crops, forestry, pasture, aquatic & hydropower issues, biodiversity, and infrastructure, at nested geospatial scales e.g. field-watershed-basins. Dr Anderson is a Professor of Energy & Climate Change at the University of Manchester as well as the Deputy Director of Tyndall Centre – for Climate Change Research (http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/).

Dear Friends of UNU-LRT. The year 2014 will soon come to an end and the year 2015 commence, which has been appointed as the International Year of Soils by the UN General Assembly.