ImPlementing Landscape Ecology for Improved SustAinability and Societal Equity of Social-Ecological Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa (PLEASE-SES)

Our suggestion of the summer school series is born from prevailing cooperation in building the Afri-can Chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology and outcomes of the WASCAL / SASSCAL (West- / South-African Science Service Centers for Climate Change and Adapted Land Use), Biomass and EU-Africa cooperation (LEAP-Agri). These initiatives enabled to build rich knowledge and cooperation, but did not yet address how to incorporate Landscape Ecological Principles as a key concept for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the training and curriculum devel-opment of the next generation of scientists in Africa. This is key since Africa is perceived to be one of the most critical continents when it comes to a societally equal and climate neutral development of our globe. Without key competences how to achieve food and water security and enable a life in dignity, migration will be pushed forward and if competences are missing how to sustainably build infrastructures and develop landscapes and regions under the pressures of a highly growing popula-tion in Africa, world will fail to achieve any of the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Our motivation is therefore, to provide training for competences to young African scientists and partner them with young German scientists for enhancing their capacities to contribute toward a more sustainable development and build respective networks of knowledge in landscape ecology to later on integrate this in their careers and in the hereupon based services to society.
With our workshop series, we will address three critical thematic blocks that comprise (a) funda-mental knowledge on landscape ecological principles, social-ecological systems functioning, model-ling and impact assessment (summer school 1 in 2020), (b) cities and urban development and how landscape ecological principles can contribute to their sustainable development (summer school 2 in 2021) and (3) principles of ecological governance as a key concept to enhance the sustainable devel-opment of societies based upon the joint development of bottom-up (community-based), regulatory and financial instruments.
The organizers as principle resource persons have a long-term and thematically wide-spread experi-ence in African needs and existing research approaches. Additional resource persons / speakers are and will be invited to sharpen the insights in the suggested summer school topics.
From a long-term perspective, we intend to develop from the experiences and feed-back of the par-ticipants in this summer school series a curriculum for being implemented in the participating, con-tributing and additionally informed and involved universities in Africa and Germany that enables young scholars to become experts in making use of landscape ecological knowledge and practices to contribute successfully to the sustainable co-development of societies across continents.