News

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.

The UNU-LRT six-month training programme 2014 has come to an end. On 18 September, 12 fellows, five women and seven men, graduated in a ceremony held at the Keldnaholt campus of the Agricultural University of Iceland (AUI). The UNU-LRT fellows this year came from Ethiopia, Ghana, Mongolia, Niger, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

This week the UNU-LRT fellows introduced their individual projects at an open seminar in the newly renovated localities of Keldnaholt campus, Agricultural University of Iceland. The fellows have been working on their projects since May and the oral presentations, along with comprehensive reports, are the final output of their work at the UNU-LRT programme. The final turn-in of their project reports is on 15 September and a few days later the graduation will take place.

Last week the UNU-LRT fellows went on an excursion to the south and south-eastern part of Iceland. The theme of the trip was climate change and its consequences. The retreat of glaciers for the last century is very vivid in this part of Iceland and the fellows got a comprehensive view of glacial changes in Iceland as an effect of climate change. Those changes were very clear in the visit to Vatnajökull National Park which encompasses Europe’s largest glacier. The trip also gave the fellows an opportunity to link the issues taught in the classroom earlier with real experiences on the ground.

Last week the UNU-LRT fellows were taken on a 4-day field trip to the West and North of Iceland. The purpose of the trip was to expose them to some of the restoration work done in the region and the challenges faced in respect to land degradation and implementation of restoration projects. The Icelandic weather played a significant role during the trip as it was raining heavily at times but that made the black wet deserts in the highlands of Iceland all the more evident.