On 28 January 2020, representatives of the CLIENT II joint projects ReKKS, Locust-Tec and KlimALEZ attended the Green Central Asia conference, along with the CLIENT II regional office the Central Asian Sustainable Innovations Bureau (CASIB). The conference hosted by the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin marked the launch of Green Central Asia, a regional initiative on climate and security in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

On 16 January, the Minister of Agriculture of Uzbekistan, Jamshid Khodjaev, met with a team of IAMO staff responsible for coordinating the KlimALEZ project.

German project partners WestfalenWind and University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhine-Sieg from the joint German-Ghanaian energy project EnerSHelF convened in Paderborn to pack and ship vital measurement equipment to Ghana. The shipment left port in Hamburg on the 2nd of January 2020 and is scheduled to arrive at our project partner WASCAL located in Tema, Ghana on February 17th 2020.

The project partners of the CLIENT II project PROCEED met in Namibia to install monitoring stations. The aim of the research visit was to record the electricity demand of selected consumers and to evaluate it remotely.

At the 25th UN climate change conference (COP25) in Madrid in December 2019, Dr Karsten Hess (BMBF) presented the two CLIENT II projects CLIMAFRI and RAIN. The side event was organised by the Science Policy Interface (SPI), an accompanying project to the CLIENT II funding measure.

A new video has been produced to introduce a wider audience to the aims and objectives of the CLIENT II funding programme, which is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The video highlights the programme’s role in facilitating international cooperation to develop innovative and sustainable climate, energy, environmental and resource solutions. It also explains its pioneering approach to promoting joint research and development projects between research institutes and businesses in Germany and emerging economies or developing countries.

On 27 November, German and Moroccan partners launched the I-WALAMAR project (Sustainable Technologies and Services for Water and Land Management in Morocco) at the University of Moulay Ismail in Meknès, Morocco.

Last year involved plenty of highlights for the CLIMAFRI project. In June 2019, the project team held its kick-off event in Benin and Togo to mark the start of the three-year endeavour to co-develop and co-implement adaptation strategies for sustainable management of flood risk and natural resources in the transboundary Lower Mono River catchment. Since then, they have organised a series of workshops, studied one of the most severe floods in the region in recent years, and presented their work at COP25 in Madrid.

In the beginning of November 2019 a delegation of twelve experts from the different German project partners of the CLIENT II project RAIN travelled to Ghana to meet the Ghanaian partners in person, to develop a joint process and to decide on where and how to start the practical experiments.

The accredited radionuclide laboratory IAF-Radioökologie GmbH in Radeberg near Dresden, which coordinates the CLIENT II project TRANSPOND, organised a joint placement for Kyrgyz and Uzbek radiochemists from 11 to 15 November 2019.