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  • Projects and activities | Last updated: 18 Jun 2019

SESASA - A Social-Ecological System Approach towards a Sustainable Intensification of Agricultural Production in Sub-Saharan Africa

Global Food and Nutrition Security

Brief me

SESASA aims at developing a "system of systems (SoS)" for assessing agricultural land-use-and-management-change scenarios and provide adaptive feed-back. SESASA will connect farmer responses to social, economic and climate changes at local scale with planning and policy instruments at national scale. SESASA will explore spatio-temporal opportunities to harmonize conflicts between arable farming, grazing and pastoralism. Our theoretical framework builds on social-ecological systems and considers systemic properties such as emergence effects that arise from a non-predictable amplification of management impacts on the availability of natural resources.

Research/ innovation questions the project intends to address:

  1. How can social-ecological-systems be operationalized in terms of smart modeling approaches and architectures to enable a highly flexible and low-data demanding assessment of the performance of agro-ecological systems?
  2. Which adaptation opportunities for arable farming, grazing and pastoralism –using scenarios –are most recommendable in different agro-ecological zones to minder food and water insecurity?
  3. How can we transfer such an approach into decision making and consulting?

Accounting local land-management practices in large-scale simulations is indispensable for understanding complex social-ecological interactions and requires a highly integrative knowledge processing approach based, for instance, on graph-node theories to reflect the complexity of drivers, agents and nature-human interactions of agro-ecosystems. We suggest implementing a multi-disciplinary SoS including the models ECOSERV (France), GISCAME (Germany) and MOWASIA (Burkina Faso) + research on planning and management practices (Burkina Faso, Ghana), environmental assessment (Ghana, Germany) and perceptions of local experts and actors (Burkina Faso, Ghana). This ensemble will be implemented to explore multiple trajectories of agro-ecosystems at nested scales.