Focus on Africa

The primary origin of the global ecological crises is the Western civilization, which built its technological development to a considerable degree on the exploitation of resources from the global South, particularly from the African continent. Additionally, during the last few decades the contribution of the emerging economies in Asia, above all China and India, to global environmental change has increased significantly. Their growth as well is partly based on natural resources from Africa.

While the ecological footprint of African communities is much smaller than of communities from other parts of the world, they are hit disparately harder by global change due to high direct dependency of their livelihoods on ecosystem services. Consequently, the advancement of ecosystem service provision is of particular relevance on the African continent.

At the same time, the comparably low level of industrialization and technological determination, the direct relationships between people and nature, the great reservoir of pristine ecosystems and undisturbed biodiversity and last but not least the high adaptive capacities of African communities bear the chance to take innovative development pathways that avoid the mistakes that were made in Europe and North America. Africa should take the lead in the reformation of the predominant economic system which is based on the capitalistic doctrine of endless growth and which ignores the finiteness of natural resources. Prolonged development progress can only be achieved when ecosystems and the environment in general are managed sustainably. Based on their traditional knowledge and inventiveness, African communities can establish new ecologically sustainable economic strategies that are required to handle the global ecological crises.

For these reasons Ecolution Africa set its focus on the African continent.