ALBATROSS
An EU Horizon Europe project about Advancing Learning and Breakthrough Actions for Transformative Resilience and Optimal Sustainability Solutions in sub-Saharan Africa.
Increasing vulnerability due to climate change requires cross-sectoral management of the territories with bottom-up approaches based on active community participation. Climate change intensifies territorial risk and impacts severely on human migration and displacement, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Avoiding maladaptation associated to internal migration as well as to other adaptation actions requires effective planning and management of migration hot spots. At the same time, it calls for more integrated strategies which simultaneously support sustainable development growth pathways and climate resilience development in diverse African contexts.
ALBATROSS is an EU Horizon Europe project coordinated by the University of Bologna with 18 partners that aims to address these challenges by delivering innovative decision-making tools based on local community-based knowledge which will support the adoption of feasible, effective, and sustainable needs-based adaptation strategies.
Eight of the project partners are leading Universities, research establishments and NGOs in five sub-Saharan countries: Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, South Africa and Tanzania. UNESCO and Oxfam are participating as international organizations through their regional offices, and UNIGE is funded as an Associated Partner by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
The task within the project that University of Geneva’s Citizen Cyberlab leads concerns the implementation of a challenge-based innovation cycle called the SDG Olympiad together with several African University partners and in collaboration with dedicated social networks for youth such as Goodwall (a Swiss SME) and Yoma (a UNICEF initiative). The SDG Olympiad will use a Citzien Science Solution Kit developed in a previous EU Project led by UNIGE, Crowd4SDG. The SDG Olympiad will be coordinated by the SDG Solution Space team, including dedicated student interns from the SDG Master program.
In addition to supporting the SDG Olympiad throughout the 3.5 years of the project, which starts in March 2024, UNIGE will also provide AI-based crowdsensing of climate data from social networks. UNIGE will furthermore participate in the co-creation and co-evaluation of Citizen Science solutions, Nature-Based Solutions, a digital repository of indigenous knowledge and other forms of support for climate-change adaptation.