Monique de Lauwere comes from South Africa, Patrick Ndaki and Godfrey Mmbando are from Tanzania. Their host is COAST - Center for Environmental and Sustainability Research. We asked them what the aims of their projects in Oldenburg are.
Doctoral candidate Patrick Ndaki sits in the canteen on the Haarentor campus and gets used to Oldenburg's food - "Food is very different here to what I know from home". The Tanzanian from Dar es Salaam has been a doctoral candidate at the University of Oldenburg for four weeks. In his home country, the educational scientist works for the Tanzanian government and is responsible for environmental education and the coordination of national strategies for dealing with the consequences of climate change, among other things. He will spend the next six months in Oldenburg working on his doctoral thesis on municipal adaptation strategies to climate change and preparing for his field research in Tanzania. He will be supervised by Prof Bernd Siebenhüner, Professor of Ecological Economics.
Godfrey Mmbando also comes from Dar es Salaam. The civil and water engineer began work on his doctoral project on hydrological modelling of climate change in Oldenburg last August. Prof Michael Kleyer, university lecturer in landscape ecology, took on the supervision. Ndaki and Mmbando are the first of several PhD and Master's students from Tanzania and South Africa to come to Oldenburg on an individual scholarship as part of the Clim-A-Net project. Clim-A-Net is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) via the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). It is an interdisciplinary co-operation project between the University of Oldenburg, the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (South Africa). The aim is to investigate the consequences of climate change in selected river, mountain and coastal regions in Tanzania and South Africa from both a social and natural science perspective and to establish an exchange between North and South. The DAAD is funding the project, which is being coordinated by COAST until the end of 2014, with almost one million euros.
The exchange activities with Clim-A-Net, which was launched last year in Oldenburg with an interdisciplinary summer school, are still in their infancy. The Developing Sustainability project is a different story. Since the end of 2009, many visiting scientists have been conducting research in Oldenburg and Oldenburg students and scientists at partner universities as part of the international university cooperation. Monique de Lauwere is one of them. The South African Master's student is currently using the network's exchange opportunities to prepare for her Master's thesis in the subject of botany in the "Landscape Ecology" working group.
Developing Sustainability is also funded by the DAAD. It promotes exchange and networking in research and teaching in the field of sustainability. In addition to the university, five partner universities in Latin America, Indonesia, East and South Africa are participating in the project, which is also part of COAST's international exchange and cooperation activities.
