News

Dear friends. The year 2019 is soon coming to an end and it has certainly been a special year for our Programme. After a long and successful collaboration with the United Nations University, the Land Restoration Training Programme has joined hands with the other three UNU training programmes in Iceland, on Fisheries, Gender Equality and Geothermal Energy, to form GRÓ: the International Centre for Capacity Development - Sustainable Use of Natural Resources and Societal Change. The Centre will become a UNESCO Category 2 centre as of 1 January 2020.

UNU-LRT ran its third short course on sustainable land management, land restoration and linkages to climate change, in collaboration with the Ugandan partners: the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and Makerere University. The course took place in Soroti, Eastern Uganda, from 21 to 29 October with 25 participants, six women and 19 men. Read More

Mr. Joel C. Owona, a former fellow from Uganda, completed a Master of Science at the Agricultural University of Iceland on 23 September. He is the first former fellow to complete an MSc degree with a scholarship from UNU-LRT. Mr. Owona attended the six-month training programme in 2008 and came back to Iceland in 2017 to start his MSc studies.

UNU-LRT was well represented at the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) World Conference, held in Cape Town, South Africa at the end of September. This was the first time an African country hosted the conference and thus a good opportunity for the UNU-LRT alumni, especially from Africa, to network and present their work. UNU-LRT hosted a symposium at the conference entitled: Land restoration for improved livelihood in Africa: Challenges and opportunities. A part from the talk from the UNU-LRT Director on capacity building for restoring land, four other speakers presented their work in the symposium, among them two former UNU-LRT fellows, Mr Mulugeta Sebhatleab Tesfay from Ethiopia (fellow in 2014) and Ms Setrida Mlamba from Malawi (fellow in 2018).

The UNU-LRT fellows graduated from the annual six-month training programme on 18 September in a ceremony at Keldnaholt Research Campus of the Agricultural University of Iceland. This was the largest group so far to graduate; 21 fellow from 10 countries in Africa and Central Asia, 11 women and 10 men. Up to date, a total of 139 fellows have graduated from the programme and 48% of them have been women and 52% men.

We would like to invite you to explore a new learning platform on the internet: www.4returns.earth. The platform is an online space for practitioners, policy makers, academics, environmental and business professionals to meet each other, share knowledge and learn about landscape restoration.