INREF grants funding for project SESAM

The External Review Committee of The Interdisciplinary Research and Education Fund (INREF) will endow the proposal SESAM (Scenario Evaluation for Sustainable Agro-forestry Management) with 1.2 M€. They especially liked the interactivity with the local reality for validation of the cases during the process.

The programme, led by the INF group (Information Technology) is a highly interdisciplinary collaboration of SSG (Social Sciences), ESG (Environmental Sciences) and PSG (Plant Sciences). Additionaly, numerous partners from Indonesia, Kenya, and Latin America participate.

It consists of 15 PhD projects plus two Post-Docs. 13 PhD students will carry out case studies in tropical forest-water-people nexus settings in three continents. These will all engage in serious gaming with local stakeholders, to get a better grasp of the nexus in an integrated way. They are embedded in cross-cutting PhD (2x) and PostDoc (2x) projects that aim at creating methodological advancements and conceptual continuity across the projects. These latter will consist of analytic and synthetic methods, integrated across forest-, water- and people issues, both for preparing the local PhDs, and for making sense of them. This includes generic agent-based models of the forest-water-people nexus situations.

The PhD projects are expected to begin in early 2020; preparatory work has now started.