Our Impact
Action research on future making and scaling nature-based solutions for climate resilient infrastructure
The impact we aim to have
Our work hopes to help local authorities, town/land use planners, shack dwellers and government agencies to integrate nature-based solutions into risk-informed urban planning and climate adaptation strategies. We envision a holistic land use planning approach that does not sideline marginalised communities but rather includes peri-urban informal settlement greening initiatives in regional, local authority acts and urban greening policy formulation and enforcement. We further hope that our work will contribute to the element of preparedness and early action.
Potential interventions include riparian buffer restoration, community-led tree planting, and sustainable land management practices to mitigate flood and heat stress. Additionally, we hope to contribute to broader national initiatives such as Namibia’s National Adaptation Plan and the Kunene Regional Development Plan, ensuring that urban resilience efforts align with national and regional climate adaptation goals.
Our ethos and approach
Our approach is to create collaborative and inclusive partnerships and working together with teams in each of our partner countries. We have locally based university partner and co-ordination team, including Ministries of Land, Housing, Health, Meteorology or National Parks. We also work with multilateral agencies including the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation and UN-Habitat – where has played a leading role in organising African Forum on Urban Forests which brings together over 800 practitioners and researchers from 28 African countries and writing the State of Urban Forests in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We have also worked with the UN Environment Programme through the Global Environmental Outlook, along with the IPCC AR6 Africa Report
Our Recent work in Sierra Leone
African Nature Futures Lab
Our lab’s guiding principles
- Apply transdisciplinary practice (see Shackleton et al., 2023) to build levels of inclusivity into research by equitably working through linguistic, cultural, conceptual or epistemological differences.
- Actively account for African, Indigenous and western derived ways of knowing.
- Surface and engage with identify politics, gender and power dynamics in relations to participating in research and transdisciplinary work.
- Analysis should be nationally owned.
- Analysis should be coherent, and align with national broader environmental, social and economic development goals.
- Results should be accessible and transparent to stakeholders.
- Establish mentorship, co-supervision and peer support networks to build empathy, agility and resilience
- Work closely and equip university research offices to coordinate and support multi-partner transdisciplinary initiatives.
