Research

The project will explore the land, gender and climate nexus in 4 African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Mali and Guinea). It will analyze how women's right to land is affected by the climate crisis in Africa and show the various ways in which protecting women's right to land can effectively contribute to addressing the climate challenge. Since 2020, the 4 grassroots organizations engaged in the research project on Women’s Right to Communal Land – CNOP-G (Guinea), COFERSA (Mali), KPL (Kenya) and PWC (Tanzania) - have documented and supported efforts to advance women’s right to land within communal land governance systems. This project has delivered 5 key findings, which were elaborated collectively during a international knowledge exchange (Kenya, October 2022), building on individual research conducted in 2020-2022 in the national contexts. First, it has highlighted the importance of protecting and recognizing communal ownership while most development actors have promoted land markets, land titling and individual land ownership as ways to ensure gender equality when it comes to land. Second, it has shown the importance of boosting the participation of women and youth in communal land governance. Opening spaces for a diversity of women and youth (using an interectional approach) to participate in more horizontal and transparent communal land governance institutions is key to promoting women’s right to land in the long run. Third, to ensure that women fully participate, putting an end to gender-based violence (GBV) is key. One of the direct impacts of violence is that it generates fear, trauma and inhibits participation. Fourth, the project has shown that women’s right to own and inherit land continues to be violated. Gender-based discrimination is very high when it comes to land succession. Finally, the project has documented the need to ensure women’s secured access to land in communal land systems, highlighting that individual ownership is not necessarily the best option. Customary systems can perform well when it comes to ensuring that everyone gets access to land, but guarantees must be provided by customary leaders/village chiefs to ensure that certain categories of women and youth are not excluded and can work the land over long periods. Women are not isolated from but are pillars of their communities. For this reason, efforts to secure women’s access to land will be more successful if they support community cohesion and community needs.

The increasingly evident social and ecological crises are not separate phenomena, but can only be dealt with in their interconnectedness. The city of Linz, like other cities, is strongly affected by the increasing impact of the climate crisis, for example by heat waves or by the lack of green spaces. This particularly affects people with low incomes. At the same time, however, spaces are emerging at the city level where it is possible to take action at the local level. This project starts from this initial situation and aims to strengthen the understanding of different civil society actors and groups (e.g. people affected by poverty, students) in Linz for the multiple crisis. Local knowledge will be used to develop climate-social action options for Linz in the context of an industrial city. By means of diverse artistic interventions, the knowledge bases and options for action will be made tangible for the general population as well as specifically for different social groups, and imaginary hurdles for transformative futures will be dismantled. In this way, the project makes an important contribution to a climate-social Linz that builds on a broad social base. This leads to the following questions: 1) What foundations are needed for artistic inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration? 2) What are the understandings and concerns of the multiple crisis in different social groups? Which climate-social possibilities for action arise for these groups and how can these perspectives be strengthened? 3) How can artistic interventions help to strengthen mediation and further work and make transformative futures tangible? The goal of the project is to use interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research processes to make discussions of critical social science research experiential and to elaborate climate-social possibilities for action. The implementation will take place through workshops and a call for artistic works.

The HUMOWAS project "Use of organic humic substances to support the growth phase of cuttings for use in arid areas" is based on the results of field exposures of roots of field shrubs carried out as part of the KLIBO project "Climate effects of soil conservation systems in arid areas using the example of the Wagram climate region". The project's overall objective is to optimize growth factors in the growth phase to promote seedling establishment and planting in dry areas, especially to reduce drought stress in new hedge plantings. The addition of humus is expected to improve soil fertility and water availability, especially in the initial growth phase. The project aims to study the underground part and the root zone and to assess carbon storage and soil fertility and their effects in practice. The project also aims to gain experience in Africa.