September 2018 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Africa looking to strategic partnerships to rein in food and nutrition insecurity

Posted on September 27, 2018April 13, 2023 by janet.crompton

A child feeds on orange fleshed sweet potato in Central Uganda – Image credit ‘Winnie Nanteza/NARO-Uganda’

World hunger continued to rise for the third consecutive year according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s latest report. The data identifies climate variability as one of the major contributing factors to this worrying statistic. The intricate relationship between climate change and food security culminates in a major challenge that has rattled individuals, organisations and governments alike for decades. In the coming decades, Africa—which faces the biggest food security challenge in present times—will need more strategic partnerships to unlock its food security potential.Nearly one in every nine people—a significant proportion of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa—go to bed hungry every night. So significant is this challenge that the United nations lists ending hunger, achieving food and nutrition security and promoting sustainable agriculture by 2030 second of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

It is a daunting challenge made worse by an exploding global population set to hit 9 billion by 2050. Nonetheless, governments and other stakeholders worldwide are drawing inspiration from the fact that, despite the increases of the past three years, hunger overall has reduced by almost half in the past two decades. This has been made possible through deliberate efforts to increase agricultural production with minimal environmental impact.

Contemporary Agricultural Science Technology and Innovations (STIs) are pivotal to increasing agricultural production, food security, and promoting economic growth in Africa. However, realizing these aspirations greatly depends on leveraging the synergistic capabilities of the diverse actors within the sector towards building stronger partnerships and increased accountability for greater impact.

The nature of Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) paradigms around the world is rapidly evolving, with new technologies constantly emerging and making the agricultural sector more knowledge intensive and innovations driven. In addition, the role of the private sector in agricultural R&D is increasingly more prominent, with Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) being touted as an ideal model for accelerating technology transfer, commercialization, and delivery of research outputs to end-users for optimal research impact. Innovative partnerships between the public and private sectors are especially important for attracting investments and financing innovative solutions for agriculture in developing nations.

To drive this innovative and responsive research agenda, scientists globally are increasingly coming together in collaborative partnerships to share resources towards ensuring that the world will be able to feed nine billion people by 2050.

Among these is the Community Network for African Vector-Borne Plant Viruses (CONNECTED)—a Vector-borne Disease Network awarded to the University of Bristol—which held its Africa Launch Conference in May 2018. The network—which is closely involved with the Cabot Institute—aims inter alia to build a sustainable network of multi-disciplinary international scientists, to deliver solutions to devastating crop diseases.

Participants at the CONNECTED Network Africa Launch, May 2018

Three months on, and the Network is already making good on its promise. Following the first CONNECTED pump prime funding call soon after the Network’s Africa launch, research funding grants have been awarded to Network members working in African and European research institutions in classic triangular collaborations to achieve the ideals of the Network.

In August 2018, global science leaders congregated in Durban, South Africa for the inaugural Bio Africa convention. The conference provided opportunities to build capacity and drum up support for increased investment in, and support for Africa’s growing biotech industry. It is hoped that networks built there will enrich the implementation of past and existing Africa-led initiatives for growth and sustainable development, especially in the bio-economy sector.

While food is an easy topic to get people involved with, rising concerns about some aspects of agricultural technology bring unique dynamics to this area. A July 25 ruling by the European Court of Justice imposed exacting regulatory restrictions on the use of gene editing in crop improvement. This adds to existing regulatory stalemates—mostly in Europe and Africa—blocking the use of products of modern agricultural technologies such as genetic engineering and gene editing to deliver important crop varieties to the world’s most vulnerable people.

In Uganda for instance, genetically modified biofortified and bacterial wilt resistant bananas, and blight resistant potatoes remain locked up in confined field trials due to the absence of an enabling regulatory environment for commercialisation. Research is on-going—using genetic engineering—on virus resistant cassava, insect resistant and drought tolerant maize, and nitrogen use efficient rice among other key food security crops.

The ebb and flow of global politics and science remains a determinant factor in whether or not agricultural STIs can contribute to ending hunger by 2030 per the SDGs. Cognizant of the constraints new breeding technologies are facing to deliver impact, initiatives like Uganda Biosciences Information Center (UBIC) have been established to support the stewardship process to ensure that key agricultural technologies reach the people that need them most.

This is achieved through creating and raising awareness of modern agricultural biosciences and biosafety, to facilitate balanced, fact-based and objective discourse on modern biosciences in Uganda and beyond. Elsewhere, the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), International Service for Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) and Cornell Alliance for Science to mention but a few, are championing the same cause at regional and global levels.

In many ways gentle calls to action, such initiatives complement the millions of voices highlighting the global food challenge and imploring all humanity to spring to action to ensure that everyone has a seat at the (dining) table.

Policy coherence and coordination among different actors to end hunger remains key to delivering much needed solutions to global food and nutrition security. To end hunger, targeted steps must be taken to help people access the tools they need to create agricultural prosperity and progress. But we can’t just hope and pray, we have to take action—and Africa seems to be beginning to do just that!

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This blog was written by Joshua Raymond Muhumuza, CONNECTED Network member and Outreach Officer at the Uganda Biosciences Information Center (UBIC).

Marvin Rees interview on the Sustainable Development Goals

Posted on September 27, 2018April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

This week is UN Global Goals week, an annual week of action where the United Nations and partners from around the world come together to drive action, raise awareness and hold leaders to account in order to accelerate progress to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals.

Dr Sean Fox, Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, recently interviewed me about why I support the Sustainable Development Goals. You can read the transcript below.

SF: You’ve been a vocal supporter of the Sustainable Development Goals, when some mayors don’t talk about them. Why do you think they’re important?

MR: I think it’s important to talk about them because we often fall victim to the stereotype of thinking the SDGs are for the global south, when actually the SDG themes clearly cross over. For example, take Water. It’s a northern hemisphere issue as well. The challenges may not be as extreme as in sub-Saharan Africa or Asian countries, but it is increasingly an issue for us with Climate change and migration.

But then the other thing is really making sure this is not just about national governments. In fact if you leave it to national governments we’ll fail, because they don’t cooperate they contest. They have hard borders. They don’t talk about interdependence like we do at the city level. We share a population in Bristol with so much of the rest of the world and we need to work as though that is true, because our population here cares about the population there. The SDGs are real and raw in the Northern and Southern hemisphere as well as within families.

SF: How can the SDGs be beneficial for Bristol?

MR: We are trying to build a global network of cities through the Global Parliament of Mayors and that involves coming up with a common language. The SDGs can be that language. There’s a proposition that national governments are failing in everything from climate change to migration, inequality and health, and it’s a failure of national policy. But it’s also a failure of a global governance structure that is overly dependent on nations. We urgently need global governance to move into its next iteration, with international networks of cities working and sitting alongside national leaders as equal partners in shaping international and national policy. We’re trying to change the architecture.

However, if we want these international networks of cities to work, we have to be able to talk to each other. One of the things that bonds mayors at a mayoral gathering is their challenges: Rapid urbanisation, health and wellbeing, adequate housing, air quality, quality education, water supplies. All mayors face the same challenges. Mayors connect at these gatherings because we’re trying to do something. I think the SDGs offer language, images and targets around which a global network of cities could rally. We need to attach ourselves to them, and interpret the SDGs as they are relevant to our local area so we can deliver them locally and globally, even if our national governments are failing.

SF: National government also share common objectives. What is the difference between being a city leader rather than a national leader?

MR: One is the proximity of leadership to life. National leadership is much more abstracted from life. I met the mayor of Minneapolis and she told me they had the largest Somali community outside of Somalia. Then I was in a taxi with a Somali taxi driver, and I was talking about this and said ‘I was in Minneapolis, there’s a big Somali community there’. He said ‘I go to Minneapolis regularly, my family are there!’ So a Bristolian lives here, but he also lives in Minneapolis because his family are there.

Now we don’t govern like that, but he lives like that. We’re a city with a global population, so there’s a vested interest in cities looking out for each other’s interests because they share populations, families, and remittances flows. There must be someone in Somaliland that wants Bristol to do well and there must be someone in Bristol that wants Somaliland to do well because that’s thier cousin, that’s their gran. I want Jamaica to do well, I want Kingston to do well.

Additionally, cities are better placed to recognise their interdependence. Nations may recognise their interdependences but they’re always drawn to borders, competing GDPs and trade deficits. It seems to be a much more a zero sum game.

SF: Why should UK mayors bother with Global Goals and networks? Why not just focus on Bristol?

MR: Often politicians offer to purchase your vote with promises. I don’t like that. It needs to be what are we going to do. We should be a city that wants to change the world, all cities should! We should want to deliver on the SDGs not just for Bristol but for the world, even if you don’t have family elsewhere, because we’ve got to save the planet. I think it’s pretty clear. We need to be delivering against the SDGs as part of our global responsibility in an interdependent world.

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This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from Marvin Rees and Bristol Mayor’s Office. You can view the original interview here.

Marvin Rees is the Mayor of Bristol. He leads the city council and its full range of services – from social care to waste collections. He also performs a broader role representing the interests of Bristol’s citizens on a national and international level.

Marvin Rees

Dr Sean Fox

Dr Sean Fox is a member of the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment and a Senior Lecturer in Global Development.

This is the second blog in our #GlobalGoals series as part of Global Goals Week 2018. Read the other blogs in the series:

Global Goals, Local Action: Bristol and the SDGs

Global Goals, Local Action: Bristol and the SDGs

Posted on September 25, 2018April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

This week is the #GlobalGoalsWeek which is a campaign to improve awareness about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals or SDGs). The 17 Global Goals cover everything from Ending Poverty, to Climate Action and they have been called the closest thing the world has to a strategy. This week we’ll be publishing some of the SDG activity that’s been happening in Bristol. To follow what’s going on check out #BristolSDGs or #GlobalGoalsWeek we’re planning blog posts from amongst others the Mayor of Bristol, Bristol City Council’s SDG ambassador and other members of the Bristol SDG Alliance.
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As the Global Goals week commences we consider how the work towards localising the SDGs in Bristol has developed in the last 9 months and look to share some lessons on the process of localisation.

In 2015 the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were ratified by 193 of the UN member nations. These goals set ambitious targets to address worldwide issues of sustainable development, such as social inequality, responsible and inclusive economic development and environmental protection. They were created for everyone, everywhere and have been described as ‘the closest thing the world has to a strategy’.

Who will be responsible for ensuring we achieve these goals and how will they be achieved?
In the realm of international agreements, national governments have traditionally been responsible for local implementation. But a combination of profound global demographic shifts and a sense that national governments are increasingly incapable of tackling complex global challenges due to domestic political wrangling has given rise to a global movement to place cities at the heart of efforts to tackle both local and global challenges. This movement, which is coalescing around a constellation of city-to-city networks (such as ICLEI, C40 and the Global Parliament of Mayors), is now grappling with the challenge of ‘localising the SDGs’. How can we usefully translate this global agenda into local practice in a way that meaningfully transforms lives?

This is the question we are working to answer through a University of Bristol funded project on Localising the SDGs for Bristol, in partnership with the Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP), and Bristol City Council.

To date the project has involved engagement locally and internationally. Our previous blog post came after the Global Ambition, Local Action conference, held in Los Angeles which Allan Macleod, the Cabot Institute SDG Research and Engagement Associate, attended. Just over a month later he was also part of the hundred of delegates who gathered in Bristol for the Data for Development Festival. During three days of plenaries, breakouts and workshops the role and use of data and technology in achieving and monitoring the SDGs was discussed. Additionally, Mayor Marvin Rees showed his local support and commitment to the SDGs by announcing an SDG Ambassador in his Cabinet (Councillor Anna Keen).

The strong leadership and commitment to the SDGs from Bristol’s mayor has been complimented by many stakeholders across the city. Bristol boasts an SDG Alliance consisting of members from organisations across Bristol including some of the city’s anchor institutions with both universities, the City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership represented as members of the Alliance. The network has been growing and now consists of well over 50 stakeholders from diverse backgrounds looking to mobilise SDG activity in Bristol. Through a series of interviews with key city stakeholders and alliance members, a Bristol Method+ report was released during the UN High Level Political Forum in July 2018. This report detailed the initiatives and actions that have occurred locally towards making the SDGs more mainstream in the city.

Another way the SDGs have been made locally relevant is through the One City Plan. Our research seeks to identify and support mechanisms for embedding the SDGs in local planning and governance processes by engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in the city.

Bristol City Council, a pivotal stakeholder is currently working to bring partners together for a new One City Plan. This Plan seeks to use the collective power of Bristol’s key organisations to achieve a bigger impact by supporting partners, organisations and citizens to help solve key persistent city challenges and improve the lives of Bristolians across the city. The core themes behind this plan align with the SDGs and it provides a great opportunity for Bristol to lead nationally and internationally on the SDGs. As a result, the Goals were integrated into the plan and mapped onto Bristol’s local priorities. By building on the work in ‘Hacking the SDGs for US Cities’, 75 of the 169 SDGs targets were found to be directly relevant to Bristol. These targets are being blended together with locally-developed priorities to form the One City Plan goals to result in ‘Bristol’s SDGs’.

Our work with Bristol city council has shown three important features of localisation. Firstly, the SDGs largely overlap with the remit of most city councils. As a result of this, the most cost effective, and beneficial method of localisation is a translation of local priorities onto the goals and the integration of the goals into the local priorities of the city. Lastly, the SDGs provide an opportunity for city leaders to engage in discussions around the same topic. They provide a global language for city leaders to share learning and best practices across contexts and borders. This is especially important as cities are increasingly aiming to take a more prominent role in international leadership.

During our project, it has become clear that Bristol has developed a solid foundation for SDG localisation and has begun to be a global leader in implementing the SDGs. However, it is a particularly exciting time to be working collaboratively on implementing the SDGs in Bristol as the city will be hosting the Global Parliament of Mayors Annual Summit (GPM) in October. The GPM will provide Bristol with an additional opportunity to showcase its leadership and demonstrate its credentials as an important international city that is working to improve the lives of all its citizens, while also working to tackle the challenges that we face as a global community.

What experiences do you have of the SDGs abroad or in Bristol? Do you have an ideas or lessons that can be applied to Bristol? If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to get in touch at allan.macleod@bristol.ac.uk.

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This blog is written by Allan Macleod, SDG research and engagement associate working across Bristol Green Capital Partnership, Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Allan Macleod

The Battle for Middle Earth: Storytelling and disciplinarities

Posted on September 6, 2018April 3, 2023 by janet.crompton

The hand of Sauron. Wikimedia Commons.

** The following blog might contain some light gaming language**

When the fellowship of The Ring left Rivendell, I suppose we all thought that that was a group very well equipped to deal with Sauron. They had Legolas’ bow, Gimli’s axe, Aragorn’s sword, a wizard and four hobbitses after all. Of course, they also had Boromir but at that time they had not really sold the whole mount Doom idea to him.

In principle, and to some extent in practise, what the Fellowship formed was an interdisciplinary group. Every member of the group had quite a specific expertise and that was each fellow’s contribution to the cause. At this point I will invite you to consider every weapon offered as a different discipline.

The challenge they were facing was quite straight forward. They had to throw the One Ring in Mount Doom and destroy Sauron.

I suppose, in terms of environmental challenges, Sauron was the kind of challenge we were facing 30 or 20 years ago. A straightforward, however big, important or urgent of course, problem that had quite a (seemingly at least) straightforward solution. Perhaps a good example of this was the quite well-known phrase of dealing with greenhouse gases, the “dilution is the solution to pollution”, that is until we realized it really really wasn’t. Another good example could be plastic and recycling until of course we realized microplastics were pretty much everywhere.

I believe that our own Battle for Middle Earth is somewhat different than that of the original Fellowship’s, and we are facing a rather different enemy. So, let’s take for instance climate change.
Climate change is not Sauron. Climate change is Sauron’s older, angrier, evil(er) brother; on steroids. For the sake of this blog I will be calling him The Beast because it is sufficiently dramatic. I think the biggest problem we have with The Beast is that it has so many heads and faces; it is a much more complex problem that requires a more complex solution (or approach?).

So, let us consider something slightly different than a group of elves, humans and hobbitses.
If you are or have ever been a gamer, especially a gamer of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGS) like World of Warcraft (please do not start WoW if you are in the middle of your studies, trust me) you know that the storylines begin very much the same way.

You appear in a place by yourself, you do things in order to gain experience, learn the game and become stronger but after some levels the game becomes so difficult and complex that you need to start forming groups in order to get anything at all done and gain the required experience to reach higher levels. At this point we are still in a traditionally interdisciplinary environment which invites experts from different disciplines to form a coherent and consistent group.

When I started playing WoW and after of course, not reading the guidelines like at all, I decided I wanted to level up as a holy paladin; a healer of sorts. Naturally that was impossible. The function of the healer is to heal other members in the groups they join (called raids) so of course a healer is not equipped to do enough damage in order to gain experience and level up. I therefore had to change my function and become a retribution paladin; basically, a paladin that can do a lot of damage. So, what I had to do was change my discipline in order to address the challenge of advancing in the game.

Furthermore, if you have ever been addicted to gaming (never have I ever) then I am sure you have probably tried playing with other characters, more than just your main one. And it was those players were the absolutely stellar players. The ones that had faced the challenges and the boss fights from more than one perspective and viewpoint. That is when you really had everything you needed, you knew every trick and every strategy; every angle. That is when you were playing from a holistic perspective.

I think that what our Battle for Middle Earth requires is a Gimli with a bow, an Aragorn with an axe and a Legolas with a sword. I suppose some would describe this as crossdisciplinary approach, but in all honesty, I prefer to imagine a Gimli with a bow. And as much as I can imagine Gimli’s face if he were ever told he had to be trained to be ‘elf-savy’ even he would have to admit that this would have come in handy in several occasions!

What is very interesting is that is the challenge that must define the approach. We cannot pre-decide on an approach and tell ourselves that this is it, this is how we are doing things from now on because that is how your entire raid group gets wiped in a boss fight that required a screwdriver and you kept poking at with a hammer.

Whether an approach should be cross, trans, intra, multi, inter – disciplinary it will be decided by the challenge. And my feeling, both as a scientist but also as a gamer is that in order to defeat our very own Beast we are going to need an even greater flexibility in the approaches we take. We are going to need that deep understanding of someone who has played the game from several roles and pathways, who is equally competent in several of them and who can throw down their bow and pick up an axe in an instance.

So yes, Gimlis with bows, Wonder Women with Xena’s weapons and Captain Jack Sparrows with…well nothing, he was perfect really.

And let the games against The Beast begin!

If you are interested (or as confused as I am) about the different disciplinarities this is a good article I have found.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Eleni Michalopoulou, a Doctor of Philosophy student in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Eleni Michalopoulou

Like this blog? Why not read more about our research that is related to Middle Earth:

Scientists simulate the climate of Tolkien’s Middle Earth (includes research papers written in Elvish and Dwarvish)Watch the talk by Professor Dan Lunt on Past, future, and fantasy climate change – from the mid-Cretaceous to Middle Earth

My work experience: Designing a renewable energy turbine in Nepal

Posted on September 4, 2018April 16, 2023 by janet.crompton

PEEDA is an NGO aiming to help off-grid communities in Nepal develop sustainably, primarily by introducing renewable energy sources that are owned and managed by the community.

Projects vary widely, and all funding comes from grants – that’s why there’s only six full-time staff at the office in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. Over the years various projects have been in partnership with the University of Bristol: that’s how I ended up working at PEEDA for my assessed year in industry. As part of the Engineering Design Degree, all students undertake a year of work experience in their third year.

Project work

My primary project for the first few months concerns the design of a pico-hydro Turgo Turbine, a small turbine which is not commonly used in Nepal despite its potential. Currently, one turbine has been imported from China and one turbine is being developed at the University of Bristol. These will be compared in the testing lab at Kathmandu University, and the final design will be manufactured in Nepal and introduced to a pilot site.

Pico-hydro Turgo Turbine

I will have the opportunity to assist with all stages of the design, working closely with the University of Bristol, the Turbine Testing Lab, and the manufacturers.

Most excitingly, I will be able to go on site visits for the project and for other projects which will involve haphazard bus journeys on winding roads to remote, beautiful areas of Nepal.

What is Kathmandu like?

The walk to work is always interesting. I may see as many as three wandering cows which are considered sacred by Hindu culture. My walk takes me past a large Hindu temple where there is always music playing and ladies in colorful saris sell flowers and fruit outside its gates.

It’s monsoon season, and after the daily downpour the mountains are visible in every direction just beyond the city.

It’s a busy, lively, polluted capital city but the people are extremely friendly and welcoming.

On my first day, my boss came to pick me up but couldn’t find the way (there are no street signs or house numbers, only vague area names). I handed the phone to the lady in the closest shop so that she could explain to him in Nepali. Every day when I walk past her little shop, she always waves hello to me.

I have been here for almost two weeks now and I have not spotted a single, functioning traffic light. My work colleagues tell me they can count all the working traffic lights in the Kathmandu Valley on two hands.

Overall, it’s mad and wonderful.
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This blog was written by Topaz Maitland, a University of Bristol Engineering Design Student on 3rd year industry placement.