Bukari Hassan won the "Farmer Innovation Contest" 2013 for his successful method to control termites with carnivore ants. The contest was initiated by ZEF (WASCAL) in cooperation with Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

December 10-12, 2013. Around 50 advanced research teams and policy makers from all over the world meet in Barcelona, Spain, to evaluate the effectiveness of forest conservation initiatives.

At this year's 'Eschborn Dialogue', an event organized by GIZ on June 18-19 and attended by around 400 experts from politics, business and industry, science and civil society, ZEF-director Joachim von Braun gave a key note on 'The economic importance of soils' during a forum on 'The competition for soil: are we losing ground?'

After six out of ten of West African states participating in the WASCAL program and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have recognized WASCAL's constitution recently, the program obtained the official status of an 'international organization'. WASCAL is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and coordinated at ZEF.

A new article co-authored by Tim Wheeler (Univ. of Reading) and ZEF-director Joachim von Braun calls for a 'climate-smart food system'. The researchers carried out a review of key scientific papers on food security and climate change since 1990. It confirmed a robust and coherent global pattern of climate change on crop productivity [...]

ZEF just published a summary of achievements and highlights of ten years of interdisciplinary research in Uzbekistan. You can download the 17-page document, written by a group of project's researchers, here.

ZEF alumna Farhat Naz from India was appointed Young DAAD Ambassador for social sciences, to promote research and higher studies in Germany at a ceremony held at the German High Commission in New Delhi, India. More information here.

We congratulate Professor Oded Stark, Distinguished Fellow of ZEF, on once again having been ranked among the top five Economics Professors in the German-speaking world and of German origin anywhere in the world.

For more information on the Handelsblatt ranking, see: Lebenswerk ranking

As of today, October 1, ZEF’s Department of Ecology and Natural Resources Management officially has a new director: Christian Borgemeister. Professor Borgemeister is now part of ZEF’s triple directorate. "I am looking forward to engaging with my colleagues at ZEF and our partners in Bonn, Germany and beyond", says Borgemeister.

ZEF’s collaboration partners from Pakistan visited the research center in November 2013. They are all working in the project “Improving Irrigation Water...

The journal Water International published a special issue on ‘Water supply and sanitation as preventive medicine: Challenges in rapidly growing economies”. The special issue is an outcome from several water research initiatives.

A recent publication on: "Public policies for rural poverty alleviation: The case of agricultural households in the Plateau Central area of Burkina Faso" investigates which economic policies are able to break the vicious circle of the poverty trap Burkina Faso.

'Marginality. Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology' is the title of a new book launched at ZEF early November. The book contains the latest and interdisciplinary knowledge about marginalized and poor people and shows opportunities to address ways out of poverty and marginality.

"Interdisciplinary research sounds easy, but it is very difficult"

- Interview with Christian Borgemeister, ZEF's new Director for

Ecology and Natural Resources Management

Doctoral research at ZEF investigated the positive and negative effects of annual burns in northern Ghana.

Water, agriculture and health are the foci of the just published ZEF news no. 28. You can read about ZEF research in Vietnam, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan as well as an interview with the new ZEF-director Christian Borgemeister.

November 8, 20103. 'Marginality. Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology' is the title of a new book launched at ZEF last week. The book contains the latest and interdisciplinary knowledge about marginalized and poor people and shows opportunities to address these issues.

A workshop on "Reframing the South China Sea - Towards a Mediterranean Understanding of Culture and Resources" is going to be held in Brunei, November 11-13, 2013. The South China Sea will be looked at as a “Mediterranean sea” and compared to other landlocked seas in Asia and elsewhere.

ZEF-director Joachim von Braun was invited to talk together with Professor M.S. Swaminathan at the 7th "Jülich Lecture" on the topic of "Feeding 10 Billion with Less". The video of the lecture is available on the Jülich website. Joachim von Braun's slides can be downloaded here.