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Land degradation in eastern Africa

Dr Anna Rabinovich and Professor John Drury from the School of Psychology, together with a multi-institutional team of collaborators, have been awarded £2.3m of UKRI/ NERC funding for a large-scale project exploring nature-based solutions to land degradation in eastern Africa. The project is titled “Enhancing climate resilience in eastern Africa by co-developing equitable solutions to land degradation and supporting their implementation” and brings together a multi-disciplinary team of soil scientists, anthropologists, social psychologists, and development studies experts. It aims to enhance climate resilience of farming and agro-pastoralist communities in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya by co-developing and testing nature-based solutions to land degradation based on local knowledge, and developing pathways to facilitating and supporting the implementation of successful solutions by the stakeholders.

Land degradation represents a major challenge to agro-pastoralist and farming communities whose livelihoods strongly depend on land resources, exacerbating vulnerabilities to climate change. Nature-based solutions have a strong potential to mitigate these impacts, but scalability across contexts, as well as successful adoption and implementation remain a challenge. The project will adopt a novel interdisciplinary approach by co-developing solutions in close partnership with stakeholder communities before assessing their feasibility and scalability across contexts. It will also explore equity issues and trade-offs for different community segments. Crucially, the funding will be used to develop group-based approaches to supporting adoption of suitable solutions by the stakeholders, building on social psychological models of cooperation and normative influence. 

Anna Rabinovich said: “The best thing about receiving this funding is having a chance to make a difference for our partner communities, and I feel very grateful for the opportunity to do this. It also enables us to learn from our partners and grow together, as we are achieving our collective aim of enhancing climate resilience, community cohesion, and wellbeing.”