About us

Climate change, protection of resources, food security and water scarcity: today, none of these global problems can be described, treated or even solved in their entirety by one subject discipline alone. For this reason, the Center for International Development and Environmental Research (ZEU), which has been conducting applied developmental and environmental research on an international scale at Justus Liebig University since 1998, mainly works in an interdisciplinary manner.
Its orientation – with respect to subject and content – towards environmental and developmental aspects is based on the idea that ecological and economic influencing variables are mostly interdependent and should thus be treated in an interdisciplinary way. Who would, today, dispute the connection between poverty and the destruction of the environment? Sustainable solution strategies require a just access to resources for everyone, which can only be realised via the appropriate institutional parameters. Hence, the ZEU's problem-oriented approach focuses on providing an interface between social and natural sciences.