Ecological threats in Africa are often discussed through the language of climate change, drought, deforestation, desertification, food shortages, and biodiversity loss. Yet these challenges are never only environmental. They affect whether families can secure livelihoods, whether young people can access education and decent work, whether communities remain in their places of origin, and whether societies can sustain peace, stability, and human dignity. This broader understanding shaped a recent roundtable discussion at the Institute of Religion and Society of Ludovika University of Public Service. Convened by Dr Richard Baafi in consultation with Prof. Dr Lóránd Ujházi, the roundtable brought together reflections arising from the African Ecological Mapping Conference held on 28 May 2026. The discussion considered how the conference’s insights might be developed into a sustained programme of research, publication, institutional partnership, and scholarly dialogue within the Institute’s Global South Research Initiative.
The conversation reached a clear conclusion that ecological sustainability in Africa cannot be separated from the social, economic, cultural, and institutional realities in which people live. Environmental pressures interact with poverty, inequality, weak public services, youth unemployment, fragile livelihoods, limited infrastructure, and governance challenges. At the same time, African societies possess important local knowledge, cultural resources, faith-based networks, and community institutions that can support resilience and sustainable development. For this reason, the roundtable treated the conference not as a single academic event, but as the beginning of a longer-term research agenda. Three connected themes emerged as particularly important for the next phase of the African Ecological Mapping Initiative.
Faith-Based Education as a Source of Resilience
The first theme focused on the contribution of faith-based institutions to education, youth development, social inclusion, and sustainable livelihoods. Across Africa and the wider Global South, religious organisations often provide services in communities where public institutions are overstretched or where access to education, training, health care, and social support remains limited. The Don Bosco model offers a valuable example. Its approach combines vocational education with mentorship, ethical formation, and personal development. Young people are not only equipped with practical skills for employment; they are also encouraged to develop responsibility, solidarity, and a commitment to their communities. In contexts shaped by economic uncertainty and environmental stress, this combination of skills, values, and social support can be particularly significant.
The Catholic Church, alongside other religious communities and faith-based organisations, operates schools, vocational centres, social programmes, and development initiatives across the Global South. These institutions often work closely with local communities and can contribute to youth empowerment, livelihood opportunities, social resilience, and environmental awareness. The roundtable therefore identified faith-based education and social action as an important area for further research. Such work could explore how religious institutions contribute to resilience, how they support young people facing economic and ecological uncertainty, and how their ethical traditions may encourage responsibility towards people, communities, and the natural environment.
Recovering Ecological Knowledge in African Traditions
The second theme addressed the ecological knowledge embedded in African cultural traditions and community practices. For generations, communities across the continent have developed ways of protecting forests, water sources, agricultural land, and shared natural resources. Sacred groves, customary conservation rules, local restrictions on harvesting, and community-based systems of environmental care demonstrate that ecological responsibility is not a new idea in many African societies. However, this knowledge is often poorly documented. It is also under pressure from environmental degradation, population growth, changing livelihoods, rapid urbanisation, and the weakening of customary institutions. As these changes unfold, valuable forms of ecological knowledge may be lost before they are properly understood, recorded, or considered in contemporary environmental governance.
The purpose of research in this area is not to romanticise tradition or to suggest that all customary practices are equally effective in present-day circumstances. Rather, it is to examine critically how indigenous knowledge, cultural values, and local institutions can contribute to sustainable resource management and environmental protection. This perspective is especially important because it challenges the assumption that environmental solutions must always be imported from outside. African communities are not only affected by ecological change; they also hold forms of knowledge and experience that may help address it. Documenting these practices can contribute to more locally grounded conservation policies and strengthen recognition of communities as active participants in environmental governance.
Ecological Change, Food Security and Migration
The third theme examined the relationship between environmental change, food security, migration, and human security. Across many parts of Africa, changes in rainfall patterns, water scarcity, soil degradation, declining agricultural productivity, and extreme weather events can undermine livelihoods. When farming, fishing, herding, or other resource-dependent activities become less viable, households may be compelled to seek alternatives elsewhere. Migration in such contexts should not be understood simply as an expression of economic ambition. For many people, mobility becomes a survival strategy in response to failing harvests, reduced access to water, land degradation, or the erosion of local livelihood opportunities. These environmental pressures often combine with unemployment, inequality, weak governance, insecurity, and local tensions, increasing the vulnerability of individuals and communities.
Food insecurity follows a similar pattern. Hunger is not always caused by a lack of food production. In many cases, food is produced but lost after harvest because of poor storage facilities, inadequate transport, limited processing capacity, weak access to markets, or failures in distribution. When governance and infrastructure are weak, these challenges become more severe. The roundtable highlighted the need to examine the entire food system, from production and post-harvest storage to transport, processing, marketing, and consumption. This approach makes clear that food security is not only an agricultural issue. It is also a question of infrastructure, institutions, livelihoods, social inequality, and public policy. Seen in this light, ecological threats are closely connected to human security. They affect not only landscapes and ecosystems, but also people’s ability to eat, work, remain in their communities, educate their children, and live in conditions of dignity and peace.
Building a Long-Term Research Platform
Participants agreed that future research should combine a continental perspective with country-specific and regional case studies. African countries face many shared ecological challenges, but their causes and consequences differ according to local environmental conditions, histories, political systems, cultures, institutions, and development pathways. Comparative research can identify common patterns while avoiding overly generalised accounts of the continent.
The roundtable also underlined the need to transform conference discussions into lasting scholarly and policy-oriented outputs. Presentations from the African Ecological Mapping Conference can be developed into journal articles, working papers, policy briefs, edited volumes, and other forms of publication. Over time, the initiative aims to establish a knowledge repository that brings together research publications, case studies, policy materials, and documented examples of African ecological experience. Such a repository would help preserve indigenous and community perspectives that are often overlooked in mainstream academic and policy debates. It could also become a useful resource for researchers, policymakers, civil-society organisations, faith-based institutions, students, and development practitioners working on environmental change and social development in Africa.
The roundtable further proposed thematic seminars during the academic year. These seminars could focus on individual countries, regions, ecological challenges, or cross-cutting questions such as migration, food security, education, customary governance, or peacebuilding. Over time, they may support the development of a multidisciplinary research network connecting scholars and institutions across the Global South.
Beyond Narratives of Crisis
The African Ecological Mapping Initiative occupies an important place within the Institute of Religion and Society’s Global South Research Initiative. Its central premise is straightforward but significant that environmental sustainability cannot be separated from the conditions of human life. Africa undoubtedly faces serious ecological threats. However, accounts that focus only on crisis, vulnerability, and need can obscure the many forms of resilience, knowledge, institutional capacity, and social creativity that exist across African societies. Communities are not merely victims of environmental change. They are also custodians of ecological knowledge, creators of local solutions, and active participants in shaping more sustainable futures.
The next phase of the initiative will therefore move beyond cataloguing ecological risks. It will seek to understand how environmental pressures interact with education, livelihoods, food systems, migration, governance, faith, cultural knowledge, peace, and human dignity. By strengthening comparative research, scholarly partnerships, publications, and thematic dialogue, the African Ecological Mapping Initiative can contribute to a more balanced and context-sensitive understanding of Africa’s ecological realities. It can also help place African experiences, knowledge systems, and policy challenges more firmly within wider debates on sustainable development, human security, and peace keeping.
Prepared by Dr Richard Baafi
Institute of Religion and Society
Ludovika University of Public Service (NKE)