Research by SDG

According to the new do-tank 2030beyond, the SDGs offer a chance to emerge from the current crisis stronger and more resilient, on track to a world in harmony, where all people can lead a sustainable, productive and healthy life. But for that to happen, we need political leadership, says the founder of 2030beyond, Kirsten Brosbøl.

How is it like to live a life in a country where there is a complex and dynamic tenure system which always leads to tensions between the farmers and the herders? Relishing the Danish summer, Suhiyini Issah Alhassan, and Daniel Kojo Leon Brenya Yeboah, talk about their DANIDA funded Ph.D. project on the recurring farmer-herder conflicts in Ghana that has worsened over the past few decades.

‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is a well-known expression, but one with pernicious effects in the context of waste. We’ve always done things a certain way. Things are made, used, and thrown away. But where do all these thrown-away things go? What do they become? What could they become? Our linear way of thinking and behaving is being increasingly criticised as landfills overflow, water supplies dry up, and air becomes unbreathable.

The Independent Research Fund Denmark - Humanities has granted DKK 1.2 mill. to an international network of researchers, who will explore how young people in West Africa navigate streams of information in crises of security, health, and migration. Project leader: Heidi Bojsen, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University

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.

In August 2000, MUCED, a consortium of four Malaysian universities, was formed to encourage new interdisciplinary approaches to environmental management. The consortium was part of a project proposed and supported by the DANCED program of the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy. Randolph S. Jeremiah became the Coordinator in the Secretariat of MUCED. In this interview he points to some of the key experiences. Today, Randolph works as Head of Water Resources at ERE, a Malaysian consultant company.

In 2018, the City of Cape Town declared a city-wide water crisis, which would be punctuated by ‘Day Zero’ – the day the city would run out of water. The drought had been looming for years, and the City of Cape Town had made some management changes, but all rested on the assumption that rain would fall at the same rate as in the past.

One of the first Malaysian students to benefit from the MUCED programme was professor Suhaimi Abdul Talib. In 2001 he went to Denmark to work on his Ph.D. project Anoxic transformations of wastewater organic matter in sewers – process kinetics, model concept and wastewater treatment potential. During two periods of three months, he had his day-to-day work in the laboratories of Institute of Environmental Engineering at Aalborg University.

When Asaf Adebua in 2017 started to study for his PhD at Gulu University 'The Contributions of Institutions of Higher Learning to Post-war Community Transformation: The Case of Gulu University in Gulu District', he was investigating the relevance of his university to the community it targets to transform, going by the university’s motto, For Community Transformation.

It was a life changing experience to replace the warm climate of Malaysia to the more cool Scandinavian environment. When the Malaysian engineer Dr. Kumeresan did his Ph.D in Denmark, he benefitted on many levels, both professionally and personally.