Critical Zones Africa

Damaged landscapes are one of the most critical issues of our time, yet they receive little attention as a local governance problem. Instead, global environmentalism is driven by intergovernmental agreements that may be inattentive to local social and ecological dynamics. Critical Zones Africa (CZA) aims to build an integrative scholarship of habitability that can lead to the revision of local environmental governance policy in Africa and further afield.

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.

Working in five landscapes in five countries, to study damage, hopes and repair strategies relevant to each place, we are working to theorise and frame an integrative science linking social actions, economic policy, ecology and infrastructure.

Current approaches to environmentalism are separated:

• by fields (particularly the society-nature divide);
• by disciplinary methods (the Environmental Impact Assessment, for example, where frogs, fish, soil, water, people etcetera are treated separately);
• by approach (the SDGs for example, are fragmented across 17 criteria);
• and by concepts (such as the financialization of nature).

Neither financialized economics nor fragmented disciplines are able to assist communities or local governance to address the challenges of habitability that are everywhere in an era when landscapes have been damaged by toxins, nutrients out of place, soil degradation, and over-abstraction of water.

Since environmental governance policies were retooled to support growth (with the rise of ecosystem services models around 2010), local environmental governance decisions have tended to privilege financialised rather ecological economics that are replenished in local Earth processes.

CZA aims to change this by generating the concepts, approach, and methods for tracking the material processes at work within any landscape: how water, nutrients, and contaminants move both vertically and horizontally through soil, aquifers and air.

We don't only follow the money: we follow the matter to make sense of the impact of financialised relationships on the integrated living systems of local landscapes, where hydrological, pedological, ecological, and social processes are co-dependent.

Via its strong focus on policy assessment, CZA is generating actionable, transdisciplinary knowledge that can inform a paradigm shift towards process-based, community-driven environmental governance.

By co-designing research questions with local communities and integrating indigenous knowledge with scientific analysis, the programme seeks to identify viable pathways for restoring ecological functionality, strengthening climate adaptation, and building capacity for sustainable resource governance across the continent.

The strength of CZA is its critical mass, without which comparative work would not be possible, and the study would inevitably be place-specific. By working comparatively, CZA has the possibility of offering major policy inputs to transform governance paradigms.

We work in the following landscapes:

• The Lake Ziway catchment, Ethiopia;
• The Upper Rufiji and Rufiji Delta, Tanzania;
• The Malingunde - Dzalanyama Forest Reserve, Malawi;
• The devastated Lake Chivero district, Zimbabwe;
• The highly polluted Muizenberg-Kuils River section of the Cape Flats, South Africa.

We also have a sixth sub-project in Mozambique and the lead researcher has a formal affiliation with Eduardo Mondlane University.

Research Themes:
Lead researchers at each university will be supported by six thematic clusters that will design curricula and guide graduate research to publication under the following themes:

1. Critical Zone rapid appraisal: assessing metabolism of water, nutrients and contaminants.
2. Small-scale farming: soil and seed care to address emerging climate-based gender struggles.
3. African environmentalism: landscape knowledge as ecological philosophy.
4. Contaminant legacies and environmental justice: cleaning up the Critical Zone.
5. Ecological economics for governance of the commons in the Critical Zone.
6. Reducing precarity by amplifying habitability: toward Critical Zone-based environmental governance policy.

Where Critical Zone scholarship based on new fields of biogeosciences has to date focused on natural sciences, this team will develop and refine a big-picture biogeo-social science that:

• supports Critical Zone-based policies for habitability;
• links with African environmental thought;
• integrates the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals;
• advances the African Union’s Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want.