In Africa, the predicted rate of urbanisation is overestimated. In India, the speed of urbanisation is underestimated. Researchers at IIED – the International Institute for Environment and Development – in the UK discovered this when reviewing the data on which the predictions are based.“There are many myths concerning urbanisation”, says...
Imagine living in a country with an abundance of fruit, but not being able to preserve them for consumption throughout the year. That is currently the case in many African countries, such as Mozambique. Until now there has been a lack of simple preservation methods, and a lot of fruit...
A ’super detector’ that can track the traces of a lump of sugar in the Baltic Sea – that was the starting point for a potentially life-saving technique developed at Lund University in Sweden. The method may now detect small traces of toxic algae blooms in drinking water. A biosensor recently developed at Lund University can...
Africa is very vulnerable to climate change. However, challenges remain in understanding the full set of climate impacts for the region. Improved climate models may help contribute to solutions for reducing vulnerability. A step in the right direction, according to the researchers Minchao Wu and Markku Rummukainen, is to incorporate into todays climate models how regional ecosystems are affected by, and affect, the climate....
How are the residents of villages in Tanzania who are victims of land grabbing doing? Physical geographer Emma-Li Johansson used art to come closer to people’s thoughts, worries and dreams of the future. How would they visualise the phenomenon? What stories would they include? “We did three paintings in each village: one representing...
Most African countries contribute only marginally to the increase of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The impact varies across the continent and also within individual countries. An improved set of data increases the...
To respond to the increasing social and economic vulnerability, smallholder farmers in East Africa have started more long term collaborations. The formation of local collaborative groups strengthens both the individual and the collective capacity to address challenges and improve living conditions, as demonstrated by Lund researchers Elina Andersson and Sara Gabrielsson in a comprehensive study. The living conditions of smallholder farmers in East Africa have...
Tropical rainforests have long been considered the Earth’s lungs, sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thereby slowing down the increasing greenhouse effect and associated human-made climate change. Scientists in a global research project now show that the vast extensions of semi-arid landscapes occupying the transition zone...
Africa’s great apes, apes and monkeys thrive in forests with plenty of fruit-bearing trees. They eat of the fruit and subsequently spread the trees’ seeds. People, on the other hand, hunt apes and other wild animals for food, and have done so for over 40 000 years. When only small groups of people subsist on game meat, the balance of...
