The last selection of the “Nature-based Future Challenge” organized by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands has recently concluded. A team of graduate students from HZAU’s College of Horticulture & Forestry Sciences, consisting of Yang Tao, Liu Siyu, Zhang Qingqing, Wang Xiyue, Chen Siyu, Wang Zichen, Shen Shiyu, and Cheng Cheng, has successfully advanced to the top ten and will come to WUR in June to participate in the Grand Finals.
The team’s entry, titled “Dancing with Water”, aims to address the challenges faced by Bangladesh, including rising sea levels, based on the Bangladesh Delta Plan (BDP) 2100 and international documents. At the national level, their nature-based solution proposed five elements - water, biodiversity, agriculture, human, and dynamics - as the core elements for dealing with Bangladesh’s issues, and developed five guiding principles accordingly.
Incorporating local natural and cultural characteristics, the team identified and analyzed regional landscape features to divide the country into 15 distinct zones. Through simulating the effects of sea-level rise over the next 100 years and analyzing the local water environment and ecological conditions, they outlined short-term goals and measures for the period from 2024 to 2075, as well as long-term objectives and plans for 2075 to 2120.
Inspired by the project “The Netherlands in 2120”, this student competition encourages multidisciplinary teams to apply their expertise and propose nature-based solutions to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss in the Granges Delta, and to promote the global adoption of such solutions. Since its launch in last November, the Challenge has garnered attention worldwide and attracted over 700 participants from 147 universities across six continents. Taking natural processes as a starting point, 45 interdisciplinary teams put forth innovative interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change and averting the loss of biodiversity, contributing their ideas for the future development of Bangladesh and the Granges Delta.
Source: https://news.hzau.edu.cn/2024/0504/69623.shtml
Translated by: Wang Jiahao
Proofread by: Song Bowen
Supervised by: Wang Xiaoyan
