Repairing Landscapes, Repairing Relations: 3 Years of Critical Zones Africa

Started in 2023 and funded with a US$4.4m DELTAS Africa II grant from the Science for Africa Foundation, the Critical Zones Africa project is well on its way to offering a transformative approach to local landscape governance.

Critical Zones Africa [CZA] is an exercise in collective paradigm shift. Based on the simple recognition that “Earth doesn’t run on dollar values”, CZA is extending an existing critical zone approach from the biogeosciences into the social sciences, by including societal flows of matter — water, nutrients, contaminants — into a comprehensive assessment of the biogeophysical relations of a landscape.

CZA is the first team globally to be working comparatively on this question to build an approach and a method that can transform local governance to be based on how local landscapes work.

What we have been up to:

After 2023 and 2024 saw the project recruiting students, onboarding staff, and developing dissertation research proposals, 2025 saw the teams get their boots muddy.

The country teams have been active in developing each site concept via field engagements, building rich dialogues with often distressed communities and frustrated officials who have no idea how to assess or repair damaged landscapes.

In Malawi, the LUANAR team have been compiling site diagnostics of the Lilongwe River Upper catchment through geospatial assessments and community consultations, highlighting issues including soil degradation and land commodification. Further South, the team at the University of Zimbabwe are working on similar diagnostics for the Lake Chivero catchment and engaging with policy and planning decision makers.

Also entering their research through the lens of the water polycrisis, the Ethiopian team at the Addis Ababa University have published a review on the impacts of anthropogenic pollution on the Central Rift Valley and continue to document Oromo indigenous ecological knowledge for climate forecasting. The team at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are making progress on their trans-disciplinary research of the Rufuji Delta conducting microbial and water sampling, geospatial analysis, and qualitative data collection.

Finally, thinking about the effects of urbanisation and ‘development’ on the landscape, the Cape Town team at UCT have been conducting ethnographic research and community dialogues on water contamination, toxic infrastructures, and conservation with their first masters fellow submitting their dissertation in December 2025.

The strong foundation offered by 42 funded fellows in the five countries, all of whom are working in teams but from different disciplines, affords the unprecedented opportunity to develop a methodology, approach and pedagogy for a "big picture science" of damaged landscapes, recognising that the desire for dignity and habitability is the most powerful possible force for the critical issue of our times: landscape repair.

Repair Landscapes, Repair Relations

Our work together to prepare for a major session at the 2025 African Climate Summit, enabled us to capture our work in the phrase: repair landscapes, repair relations. This simple insight, that tracks the impact of changing social relations on material flows in a landscape, offers a clear page unencumbered by the fragmentary thought that comes to bear on landscapes conceptualised by different disciplines. By offering an integrative approach to landscapes via material flows, we can position disciplinary methodologies to bring data and insights to bear on the big picture, rather than being disempowered by pixellation.

The concept of habitability has come to dominate our discussions, offering routes to dignity, wellbeing, health and liveable futures. CZA has the potential to contribute a major intervention in improving sustainability governance by framing a ‘big picture science’ of landscapes that integrates history, soil and water sciences, climate risk, indigenous knowledge, policy and governance.

Part of this potential comes from turning to African scholarship, particularly from the 1930s-1980s, as the integrative science solutions offered by critical zone sciences have a great deal in common with the work of Césaire, Cabral, Sankara, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kaunda, Maathai and others who sought to rebuild Africa in relation with soil. Two book publications link the CZA project to both African political thought and to contemporary transdisciplinary landscape sciences. Namely: The edited collection Reclaiming African Environmentalism (May 2025), and the forthcoming translation of Cabral's soil science, To Defend the Earth Is To Defend the Human: Amilcar Cabral on Soil, Society and Freedom (April 2026).

Policy & Public Engagement

Unique to the CZA project is the inclusion of policy experts from the beginning, ensuring our research findings can be translated effectively to local decision makers. Our 6th institutional team at the Human Sciences Research Council [HSRC] have been working across the five country teams to sensitize students to project planning that involves informing policy as an objective.

The HSRC has empowered our research teams to co-create solutions which involve policymakers and decision makers at different levels as well as communities that are beneficiaries of policies. On a larger scale, the HSRC continues to do comparative policy analysis across all our country sites — identifying gaps, mis-alignments, and opportunities for intervention.

Community and Public engagement is a key part of the CZA story as the project has consistently emphasised placing communities at the centre of research and co-producing solutions. All country teams continue to host community engagements which are bridging the divide between science, people, and landscapes and are often a rich space of dialogue, co-creation, and knowledge exchange. Another notable public engagement has been the Malawi team’s radio program airing on LUANAR FM. Here, the team have developed radio programs which discuss the mindset change required for the CZA paradigm shift.

What’s next?

2026 will see many of our graduate fellows fine tune their work towards completion. During these final phases they will work with the early career research fellows and HSRC team to publish impactful papers and policy briefs that re-imagine the possibility of landscape repair beyond financialised solutions. Collaboration across sites and teams remains a focus and we look forward to the work being produced from this collective writing effort.

On the ground, the country teams will continue to think collectively with their respective community partners. We look forward to sharing the local stories of resistance, repair, and solidarity with communities in our five country sites. This presents the opportunity to create cross-continental dialogues and networks focused on the repair of local landscape relations.

CZA continues to build new partnerships with scholars and institutions across the globe who share our vision for a paradigm shift in local governance for habitability. We are excited about how these new relationships can advance integrative scholarship and habitability on the continent.