Coordination Funds

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katrin Böhning-Gaese
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428658210

Across the world, human population growth and increasing demands for natural resources lead to the loss of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP), mostly driven by land-use, climate and governance change. A key global challenge is, thus, to develop sustainable relationships between people and nature. Addressing this pressing topic requires social-ecological research toward understanding major components of the feedback loops between nature and people. However, such integrative social-ecological research approaches are still in their infancy. The Research Unit Kili-SES addresses these challenges at Kilimanjaro, an excellent study region with uniquely large environmental gradients and an unusual variety of stakeholder groups. In Kili-SES we use a fully integrated, interdisciplinary approach to understand major components of the social-ecological system (SES) of Kilimanjaro under land-use, climate and governance change. We address the interrelationships between multiple components of biodiversity, regulating, material and non-material NCP, people’s values of and demand for NCP and multiple constituents of people’s well-being. We consider institutional and multi-level governance arrangements and the effect of land-management and conservation on biodiversity. For the second phase, Kili-SES-2, we add, as a new component, research to understand the potential and the leverages for social-ecological transformations to enhance resilience and sustainability of local communities. In addition, we expand the spatial scale of the analysis and address, where relevant, larger spatial scales or the role of higher-level jurisdictions. Kili-SES-2, builds on data on biodiversity and NCP supply collected in Kili-1 and Kili-SES-1 on 65 study plots and 13 focal plots, representing 13 different ecosystem types. Furthermore, it builds on the identification of the major stakeholder groups, i.e. villagers, nature conservationists, tour guides and tourists and on data on NCP demand, values and governance from semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and a large household survey of 366 inhabitants from 14 different villages. Specific questions in Kili-SES-2 are: How does landscape-scale NCP demand and supply translate into stakeholder-specific demand-supply (mis)matches and how do these relate to human well-being? What are possible data-driven scenarios and participatory Nature Futures? What are leverage points for transformative change and how do they link to pathways for sustainable and just Nature Futures? Our approach will allow us to quantitatively describe and integrate the major components of the Kilimanjaro SES and their interlinkages in a spatially explicit manner. With Kili-SES we will advance fundamental social-ecological research and provide a scientific basis for political and societal decision-making that will facilitate transformations towards sustainable relationships between nature and people at Kilimanjaro and beyond.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5064: The role of nature for human well-being in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System (Kili-SES)
• International Connection: Tanzania
• Cooperation Partner: Allan Kijazi