Urbanization is a dominant demographic trend of global land transformation with climate change greatly affecting urban livelihoods and habitats. There is a clear need for innovative approaches to better understand climate change resilience, social cohesion, and mobility, in urban areas situated at the frontlines of climate change impact. Sustainable Development Goal 11, also known as the Urban SDG (USDG), is focused on how urban communities can build resilience and social cohesion to help mitigate climate change, develop climate action and adapt to increasingly challenging climate change conditions in urban areas. 

The concept of the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus was developed to better understand protracted conflicts, forced displacement and intense environmental hazards, all contributing to a cycle of vulnerability. In addition, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, demonstrated a close linkage between good governance, sustainable management of resources, and peace; the democracy-environment-peace nexus. In many cases, local knowledge on how to mitigate and adapt to climate change and become more resilient is already present and being implemented on community level. 

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Within these broad areas of enquiry, this final symposium of the MaU-led Resilience in Urban Sudan (RUS)research project, took place on 25-26 August. Scholars, researchers, students, practitioners, policy makers, civil society and NGO representatives were invited to participate in this final symposium. This conference gave opportunity to exchange knowledge with a delegation of eminent Sudanese researchers involved in the RUS project who were visiting Malmö for these 2-day symposium.  

During the conference, the Sudanese-Swedish research team presented the results of our 3-year RUS project, which started at the end of 2019. This interdisciplinary project involves collaboration between researchers in Sweden and Sudan and combines environmental sciences, humanities and social sciences. The RUS project is supported by the Swedish Research Council projectnumber 2018-05773.