The GWZO has affiliated itself with four other organisations of the Leibniz Association to form the Leibniz research network »Knowledge for Sustainable Development«, allowing all organisations to merge their competences towards the goal of further developing research for sustained developed and promoting sustainable societal transformation.

The network partners are the ARL – Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), the Leibniz Institute for Ecological Territorial Development (IÖR) as well as the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT). Further institutions both within and outside of the Leibniz Association are also affiliated. 

The partners will in future support academics with their research for sustainable development – for these academics are facing particular challenges. To create and integrate the knowledge necessary for transformative, sustainable development, researchers called upon to not only work in an inter-disciplinary manner but also to surmount the boundary between academia and practice. This requires continually reflecting upon and developing further the relevant approaches to research and transfer.

This is where the Leibniz research network »Knowledge for Sustainable Development« comes in. It pools and connects research competencies in the Leibniz Association with the goal of lending more influence and effectiveness to the sustainability sciences. In order to support exchange within the sciences as well as between academia and practice, the network will implement various event formats: future dialogues with key figures from politics, business and civil society as well as interdisciplinary summer schools for post-docs take place annually. And the network has planned a trans-disciplinary synthesis workshop and an international conference on the core questions of the sustainability sciences to take place every two years, alternating.

The opening event will be a future dialogue on the topic »Sustainability Research and the Corona Pandemic« in the spring of 2021, focusing on how Corona conditions affect sustainability research. A synthesis workshop is then planned for September, to grapple with »Learning from Real-World Laboratories and Experiments in the City of the Future«.

The co-speakers of the Leibniz research network »Knowledge for Sustainable Development« are Rainer Danielzyk, general secretary of the Academy for Territorial Development in the Leibniz Association and Professor for Land Planning and Territorial Research at the Leibniz University Hannover, and Marc Wolfram, director of the Leibniz Institute for Ecological Territorial Development (IÖR) in Dresden and Professor Territorial Development and Transformation at the Dresden University of Technology.