News

UNU recently launched its Sustainable Development Explorer, a new campaign highlighting UNU’s work to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the SDGs unite global action to overcome the world’s biggest challenges, from hunger and poverty to equality and peace.

Dear friends of UNU-LRT. The year 2017 will soon come to an end - the year we celebrated our 10-year anniversary. In those 10 years, over 100 specialists have been trained in Iceland, short courses have been developed and implemented, and staff as well as former fellows have been active in many events worldwide. We are grateful to all who have collaborated with us on this amazing journey. We send our best wishes for the festive season ahead and wish you a Happy New Year. The UNU-LRT Team

In 2017, UNU-LRT went through a comprehensive external evaluation. The evaluation also included the other UNU training programmes in Iceland on geothermal, fisheries and gender equality. The evaluation was carried out by the Scandinavian consultancy company NIRAS. The recently published evaluation report was very positive and shows that UNU-LRT and the other three UNU training programmes are highly relevant to the trained specialists (the fellows) and their institutions as well as for the Icelandic development cooperation strategy.

This autumn, UNU-LRT offered a short course in Uganda on “Sustainable land management, land restoration and linkages to climate change”. The 9-day course was organised in cooperation with the Ugandan partner institutions of UNU-LRT, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and Makerere University. The course was held in Kasese municipality in Western Uganda and the participants were 25 officers from 18 different districts in Western Uganda, who work on environmental issues within their districts.

On 13 September, UNU-LRT celebrated the graduation of 14 fellows from the annual six-month training programme. The graduates come from eight countries in Africa and Asia: Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mongolia, Niger, Uganda and Uzbekistan. With the graduating fellows of 2017, the total number of graduated fellows from the Land Restoration Training Programme has reached 101 fellows, 46 women and 55 men.

This week the UNU-LRT fellows presented their research projects in an open seminar at the research campus of the Agricultural University of Iceland. The research projects address a wide range of issues linked to land condition and management such as assessment of how existing wetland policies and laws in Uganda address the drivers of wetland degradation; effects of increasing droughts, due to climate change, on pest damage in Ghana; assessment of land degradation and drivers of degradation in Mongolia; impact of watershed management on land cover change in Ethiopia; designing restoration plan based on land condition assessment; and use of the arts to promote environmental awareness in Ghana. One of the outputs of the project work was a song by Beatrice Dossah, inspired by her work on environmental art education in Ghana. You can see the seminar programme here.