We are students in the Global Sustainability course and participating in the student project of Forest21, which is joint project for the strengthening capacity in South Africa higher education in forestry. There are a lot of students involved in the project of which four are from Häme University of Applied Sciences. The students from HAMK side have already had a face-to-face meeting and started getting to know what is expected of us in this project.
Our educational backgrounds are slightly different from each other, which brings different perspectives to the work. What we all have in common is that we have also studied and worked with other things before our studies at HAMK. During this project, two of us study forestry, one is studying bio-economy, and one is from the horticulture studies working to build the environment.
Our mentor, Romi was available to provide us more information during the first face-to-face meeting because he was in South Africa at the time attending the partners meeting. He informed us on the dates for the field challenges and what our project will be about. We are excited and look forward to learn more as we dive into the project in the coming weeks.
The goal of the student project will be to identify risks and vulnerabilities in terms of changes in macro- climate patterns; strategies to mitigate anticipated negative impacts; entrepreneurial opportunities in a wider socio-ecological system to ensure a sustainable, viable, equitable and resilient forestry production landscape, as well as indicators that can be monitored to encourage a resilient, climate-smart forestry landscape. The focus of the project is on problem-based learning (PBL) methods and student-oriented teaching.