Strategic topics

Achievements, current strengths and future strategic directions of the ETH Zurich guide the focus of the North-South Centre. In the near future, the Centre will concentrate its resources on four thematic areas. Nevertheless, it will be open for emerging issues and would adapt its portfolio accordingly, if these issues were judged as being relevant and if the members of the North-South Centre had the comparative advantage to tackle them.

All thematic areas contribute to the overall goal:

Sustainable development for human well-being

Research projects related to developing countries

More than 10% of all professors at the ETH Zurich pursue activities in or related to developing countries. The majority of them are members of the North-South Centre. A particularly great wealth of research is dedicated to food security and natural resource management. Many development-related research projects cut across disciplines and integrate colleagues from various institutes and departments.

In congruence with the strategy of the North-South Centre, the individual projects are grouped according to the four thematic research areas food security (FS), natural resource management (NRM), urban and rural transformation (URT) and technology and infrastructure (TI), complemented by some projects in the area of policy.

While these five topics permit the assessment of the wealth of research in each particular field, they do not adequately reveal the interdisciplinary nature of most of the projects, nor the somewhat blurred delineations between the different research areas. For this reason, all projects holding a strong correlation with a neighbouring research area are marked with a vertical bar and the respective acronym FS, NRM, URT, TI or Policy. Find the lists on the following pages:

• Food security
• Natural resource management
• Urban and rural transformation
• Technology and infrastructure
• Policy