UNESCO’s network of centres of excellence are using science to catalyse sustainable development

At the heart of Africa, the remarkable CongoFlux tower is 55 m tall – roughly the height of the 17-storey building – rising 15 m above the forest canopy in the Congo Basin to measure the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere and the forest to evaluate its role as a carbon sink. It is a first for the Congo Basin, which has been far less studied than another major carbon sink, the Amazon Basin. The tower was installed in 2020 by the Regional Postgraduate School of Integrated Management of Tropical Forests and Lands (ERAIFT), based in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the University of Ghent (Belgium), in the framework of a project led by UNESCO.

ERAIFT was established in Kinshasa 30 years ago with UNESCO’s support[1]. It trains African specialists and decision-makers to apply an ecosystem_based approach to managing African forests. In order to ensure that the local population benefits from this new focus on the Congo Basin, ERAIFT is also implementing socio-economic and socio-anthropological studies as part of the project.

Meanwhile, in West Africa, UNESCO has been developing an early warning system for floods with the support of another member of its network of centres of excellence, the International Centre for Water Hazard and Risk Management. Between 2008 and 2020, West Africa experienced unprecedented flooding which devastated agriculture, livestock, freshwater supplies, infrastructure and homes. ‘The damage has been catastrophic’, sighs Dene Salifou from the Volta Basin Authority's Observatory for Water Resources and Related Ecosystems (Burkina Faso).  

The project has created flood simulation models and trained more than 300 experts from the 11 countries involved, namely Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria. 

The UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy, and Science at the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is taking a different approach. It is employing natural flood management techniques in the Scottish border region to boost local resilience to floods. By creating ponds, remeandering river channels and planting trees, the Eddleston Water Project has reduced the risk of flooding for local communities and protected local wildlife. The area where the project is being implemented is the UK's only UNESCO Ecohydrology Demonstration Site. 

Training water professionals to ensure that we can manage water sustainably has never been more important than today, as climate change exacerbates the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. In the Netherlands, the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education offers accredited MSc and PhD programmes to students from around the world, as well as research opportunities. Since its inception in 1957, the institute has trained over 25,000 water professionals from 190 countries, making it the largest international facility for graduate water education. 

Other centres operating under the auspices of UNESCO also provide advanced training. In Thailand, for instance, the International Training Centre for Astronomy has organized more than 70 educational and professional workshops since 2017 for over 3,800 participants. 

History is not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of space technologies, yet there is no better vantage point from which to ‘see’ into the distant past than from a high altitude. At this height, satellites and other space technologies can detect the remnants of buildings and other traces of human activity from thousands of years ago, which would go undetected from the ground. 

When scientists from the International Centre on Space Technologies for Cultural and Natural Heritage in China collaborated with their peers from Italy, Pakistan and Tunisia to survey terrain in southern Tunisia that used to lie at the western end of the ancient Maritime Silk Road in 2018, they made several archaeological discoveries. Among them were ten ancient Roman sites, including two forts, three sections of defensive walls (limes), three water storage cisterns, an irrigation system, a military defence system and an ancient tomb.