YESPV-NIGBEN is a German-African CLIENT II project that aims to support food and energy production in Nigeria and Benin by developing climate-friendly and efficient land-use resources for food and energy production. At the launch event at the research institute Forschungszentrum Jülich on 13 August, Thomas Rachel (MdB) from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) presented the funding certificates to Prof. Harald Bolt from the Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich and Dr. Solomon Agbo, who is coordinating the project, as well as other project partners.

On 24/6/2019, German and Central Asian representatives from science and industry met in Almaty to usher in the launch of the CASIB regional office as part of a stakeholder conference. The event focused on the emergence and strengthening of networks for joint scientific and economic collaboration between Germany and Central Asia in the context of the CLIENT II funding measure.

At the beginning of April, the Institute for New Energy Systems (InES) at the Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences (THI) launched a new project for sustainable energy supply in rural Africa: PROCEED (short for "Pathway to Renewable Off-Grid Community Energy for Development").

Urban agglomerations are growing worldwide and new megalopolises are emerging. The dense settlement structures with millions of people are particularly vulnerable to natural hazards. In the RIESGOS project (Spanish for "risks"), the Earth Observation Center (EOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) investigates natural hazards and their interactions using the Andean region as an example.

The first annual meeting of the RIESGOS project took place from October 16 to 17, 2018. For almost a year, the RIESGOS team has been working on the research and development of scientific methods to better understand complex interactions in multi-risk analysis and prevent future natural disasters.

Under the leadership of the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR), a German consortium is planning a drone-assisted method for exploring uranium mining legacies in Central Asia in cooperation with partner authorities from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

People all over the world are rushing to cities, forming increasingly densely populated regions. As a result, natural hazards are also threatening more and more people - the risk of being affected has been increasing worldwide for decades. A disaster is rarely an isolated incident: A flood can cause a landslide or an earthquake can cut off the power and water supply, meaning situations can be exacerbated for those affected as well as task forces. The possible implications of such escalation chains are illustrated by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in 2011, in which an earthquake triggered a tsunami disaster on the Japanese coast, subsequently damaging the nuclear power plant.

Together, German and South African researchers are studying how sustainable agriculture can be achieved in the South Cape. Secretary of State Thomas Rachel visited a local wine-growing establishment which tests innovative methods in practice.

Researchers from the IEEM - Institute of Environmental Engineering and Management - at Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H) are working on the conservation of freshwater and land resources in Vietnam in a new joint project. Together with German and Vietnamese partners, they are developing strategies and technology in the Mekong Delta. The interdisciplinary German-Vietnamese project "Vietnam Water Technologies" (ViWaT) is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FMER).

In August and September 2018, all partners involved in the Lin4Future project met for a joint Sino-German team meeting. They included a researcher and a forestry expert from the Chair of Forest Growth of the University of Freiburg, a software developer from GISCON Systems, forest scientists from the Chinese Academy of Forestry, and the director and staff from the Zhongtiaoshan State-Owned Forest Bureau.