Congratulations to Bastian Winkler! He is the winner of the NatureLife Sustainability Award 2014. [01.07.14]
The award endowed by NatureLife International (Foundation for the environment, education and sustainability) is awarded to promote young scientists in the field of sustainable land use systems as a basis for conservation of biodiversity in the tropics and subtropics.
Bastian Winkler is awarded for his outstanding work on "Monitring and Evaluation of Integrated Renewable Energy Potential Assessment- A case study in Mgwenyana, rural Eastern Cape, South Africa.
The Integrated Renewable Energy Potential Assessment (IREPA) is a framework previously developed by Bastain Winkler and fellow students in a group project work at the University of Hohenheim. It was designed as holistic and participatory framework to assess the potential of decentralized renewable energy systems at household and community level. The most appropriate technologies for renewable energy production are selected considering issues related to human, social, environmental, economical and technical factors. The IREPA offers an alternative to classical top-down approaches designed centrally and should account for local conditions and provide stronger involvement of local stakeholders from the beginning. In this work the IREPA was applied in the rural community of Mgwenyana in South Africa and its methodology was monitored and evaluated. Therefore the Guide to Monitoring and Evaluation for Energy Projects (M&EED IWG 2006) was employed in order to adapt and improve the IREPA framework for future applications in other rural contexts. His work revealed that the IREPA framework provides a well working and efficient framework to shift the focus from centralized planning and blueprints to local diversity and a mutual learning process.Hence the IREPA framework could be applied in other rural areas to foster self-sustainable rural development by combining traditional and modern knowledge and skills.
