From rural to urban and vice versa: RUNRES investigates circular economies in Africa
- D-USYS
- Institute of Agricultural Sciences
- World food system
- Environmental sciences
The project RUNRES, led by researchers of the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group and the Transdisciplinary Lab of ETH Zurich will be working in four different African countries and on four different food value chains: coffee, cassava, banana and vegetables. The goal of RUNRES is to close the nutrient cycle in city regions and build so-called circular economies, where nutrients from waste are recycled to be used in food production.
"The rural-urban nexus: Establishing a nutrient loop to improve city region food system resilience" – in short RUNRES – will be conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia and South Africa. "The objective of the RUNRES project is to co-establish safe, efficient, and socially acceptable innovations to close the nutrient loop and install a circular economy," explains Johan Six, Professor of Sustainable Agroecosystems at ETH Zurich and the person responsible for the coordination of the project. To achieve this goal, the project actively involves stakeholders at all stages of the value-chain in so-called transdisciplinary innovation platforms.
In a first phase, RUNRES will run for four years pilot studies in the four city food regions and if successful will be scaled up in a second phase to other regions in another four years.
The project is funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (DEZA). It is coordinated by researchers from the Agroecosystems Group and the TdLab at ETH Zurich and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Rwanda and DRC, the University of Arba Minch (UAM) in Ethopia, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa.
To the RUNRES project website