From Kilimanjaro’s foothills to its summit: Leuphana researchers advance insights on people-nature relationships for sustainability transformations
2025-02-25 In 2021, Prof. Dr. Berta Martín-López and her team started their work as part of a DFG research unit studying the question of how nature contributes to human well-being at Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. The international and interdisciplinary collaboration entered a new funding phase in February 2025 – time to ask Prof. Martín-López and PhD fellows Milena Groß and John Sanya Julius about their findings and next steps.
What is the main goal of your research in the second project phase?
Berta Martín-López: We will explore the potential of organisations, projects, and initiatives in the Kilimanjaro social-ecological system to foster changes towards sustainability and equity. To do this, we look at how they organise themselves, what goals and ambitions they pursue, what value systems underpin their decision-making, and what kind of knowledge they use. This helps us to understand socio-ecological dynamics and to identify what we call Seeds for Good Anthropocenes (e.g., organisations or initiatives). In other words: we explore how humans and nature relate, but we also take a step further by uncovering elements that might initiate (greater) transformation potential towards sustainable and just futures.
How did you approach your research in the first phase?
Milena Groß: To gain a broad understanding of what nature contributes to people’s quality of life and why it matters to people, we interviewed and surveyed four different groups: farmers, nature conservationists, tour guides, and tourists. Mount Kilimanjaro offers diverse opportunities for people to make a living and experience its nature. Its climate and nutritious soils favour agricultural activities. There are also conservation projects on the slopes of the mountain run by community-based or non-governmental organisations. Tourism is critical because of the national park in which one needs professional tour guides. This is why there is a great variety of actors differing in their relationships with and stakes in nature. We conducted more than 620 contextualised surveys in person. This was a collaborative effort across six subprojects of the research unit. We had an amazing team of field assistants as well as other PhD and Postdoc fellows.
Which research methods did you use and what did you find out?
John Sanya Julius: One method we used for the interviews is called photovoice: The participants could take photographs to express their relations to their natural surroundings. Instead of being asked specific questions, the photos served as a starting point for them to talk about their daily life and let them reach further. This showed that they connect various “nature’s contributions to people” (NCP) and diverse values and emotions with nature. We found that within a particular area, people may have different ways of relating to nature, even within the same social group. For example, the farmers who live close to the national park do not necessarily connect the same emotions to nature as those living in the lowlands. The method helped us to better understand how people benefit from nature and what is important to them.
Did you share your results outside the scientific community?
Milena Groß: Our team embarked on a knowledge exchange tour: we presented preliminary results through talks and posters featuring quotes, visual illustrations, photos, and layperson-friendly language. Jelke Meyer, who was a bachelor student at that time, created four different posters, and we had an exhibition that also featured photos taken by the research participants and our team. We hosted seven events, both in Swahili and English. 160 people in total were interested in learning about and discussing our research.
John Sanya Julius: The posters and a video designed by Jelke Meyer, in which she explains the benefits of research communication as part of her thesis, are available online.
And what comes next?
John Sanya Julius: After finalizing my PhD, I will return home to continue working at the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka, where I was before joining Leuphana. Previously, I did my bachelor in tourism and cultural heritage in Tanzania and my master’s degree in environmental governance in Germany. However, I will collaborate with the research group on site, for example by assisting in the field.
Milena Groß: I will continue as a Postdoc and, as Berta said, part of the research will be to characterize the Seeds. My task will be to find out how they interact and in doing so, spark and amplify transformation potential toward just and sustainable futures.
Berta Martín-López: Through our field work, we have started to build networks among many people and social actor groups. Our research concerns such Seeds on the Southern slopes of the mountain that support transformation. Overall, the entire research unit collects data on the area reaching from the savannah ecosystem at the foothills to the glaciers on top of the mountain and from the east of the southland slopes to the far west. The results of all six subprojects will be synthesized in a seventh subproject that is co-led by me and three other colleagues: Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Markus Fischer, and Dirk Zeuss.
Thank you very much!
The subproject “Understanding social-ecological transformations: the role of initiatives’ values, rules and knowledge” lead by Berta Martín-López is part of the research unit The role of nature for human well-being in the Kilimanjaro Social-Ecological System (Kili-SES). With the format “research unit”, the German Research Foundation (DFG) supports close collaborations between excellent researchers. DFG research units aim to establish new ways in research, often in interdisciplinary and international cooperation, as this example shows.