Life on land

Enlisting the Public The universality of the themes covered by the SDGs speaks to the fact that there is not only space, but also interest, for the public to participate in the work towards the SDGs; contributions “through the involvement of...

Advisors have been replaced by consultants. Broader projects have partially been replaced by narrower ones with singular purposes. This has had both positive and negative impact on the development research that takes place, says a Danish veteran. Once upon a...

Researchers from Aarhus University are involved in finding sustainable ways for wildlife and indigenous lifestyles to survive in the Maasai Mara savannah in Kenya. Traditional fieldwork among the population is one way to do it, working with big data from...

New technologies open the way for new possible approaches to developing the Global South – and new methods for researching this development. A Danish anthropologist has become a professor at the IT University in Copenhagen. One of his aims is...

Ghana is ranked amongst the top five producers of gold in Africa. Research revealed that an estimated number of 50,000 Chinese individuals migrated from China to Ghana between 2008 and 2013 to engage in artisanal small-scale gold mining (ASM) activities....

The summer of 2022 will be remembered as a brutal season in the history of climate change.  Heatwaves killed at least 90 people in India and Pakistan, as the temperature soared as high as 46-48 degrees centigrade. Europe saw heatwaves...

Our planet is rapidly growing warmer. Initiatives are surfacing to not just adapt to, but actively combat the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon capture technology is in its infancy, but we already have one method of removing...

Ghana is the leading producer of minerals, especially gold in Africa. But more than 35% of the country's minerals are extracted by small-scale miners, most of them operating illegally. Pollution from mining has contaminated water sources across the country with...

While we fight for the last grain to survive, the Higaonon tribe – a group of indigenous peoples in the remote mountain villages of Bukidnon, Philippines – have lived for centuries utilising the plant resources in their ancestral land. These...

The Independent Research Fund Denmark – Social Sciences has granted DKK 2,7 mill. to Postdoc Paul Austin Stacey, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University. Illegally accessed resources comprise an expanding, billion-dollar sector in many sub-Saharan African countries. The new project is focusing on illegal gold mining in Ghana.

Meet the Ecuadorian scientist who defied machismo-culture in the academic world in Ecuador, to study thoroughly a big passion for her – climate change and its effects on her native mountain region and in the end the water supply in the country.

There are many opportunities for European and non-European students to travel around in Europe and in the world to meet other students and different realities. DDRN university intern, Dori Zantedeschi, joined the ELLS conference 2019 for life science students in Uppsala, Sweden, Here she introduces the conference and interviews three non-European students. 

In November 2019, I was In Uppsala for the ELLS Student Conference (see article), organized by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Ultuna campus. On the second and last day of the conference, I went to Danilo Crispim Massuela’s poster presentation. I like poster presentation, because the atmosphere is more familiar since you stand all around the poster and the presenter.

The first time I spoke to Dr. Expedito Nuwategeka was on the telephone. In my mind I saw the image of a 60-year old man sitting on a wooden chair with piles of books at his table. However, that is not the image I arrived to at Gulu University on an April afternoon to meet him.

The Colombian hydroclimatologist Daniel Ruíz Carrascal is one out of only three IPCC authors from Colombia. He has dedicated his life to studying climate change, especially in the mountains and the páramos (the moorlands). And he is worried about the future - he doesn’t have a clue what will happen with those fast and important changes.

Meet a Colombian scientist, passionately researching about the pink river dolphin, a crucial species to protect aquatic ecosystems in the Amazon. The enormous habitat of those border-crossing dolphins makes them a key-species to protect big areas. If they are well, so is the Amazon. And when the Amazon is on fire, it affects species like the dolphin, as well.

Meet the Ecuadorian palm-expert who has dedicated almost twenty years of his career to specialize in this plant-family which is widely popular – for conservation and industrial purpose. Just in Ecuador there are 140 palm species – and this man knows to distinguish them all.

Once dry tropical forests in Ecuador were common ecosystems. Now there is only eight % left of this type of forest, which has had the bad luck to compete with the most invasive of all species: The humans. Meet the Ecuadorian scientist who has specialized in the dry tropical forests.

Danish support to research in Ecuador has contributed to document the mega biodiversity in the national park of YASUNI – the biggest in the country, the most famous – and also by far the most controversial national park – maybe even in the South American continent.

At Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), a large university in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, one of the leading researchers, Hugo Navarrete, recalls the support by Danish colleagues during his early career in tropical biology.