The Summer School was organized in the frame of the German Water Initiative for Central Asia (“Berlin Process”), which has been launched by the German Federal Foreign Office in 2008. CAWa, as the scientific component of the “Berlin Process” has been engaged in the field of water research during the last decade and increasingly offers workshops and trainings for young scientists in Central Asia.

23 young, motivated master and PhD students as well as junior specialists from government agencies and research institutions participated in the summer school. The international group included participants from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
The CAWa project provided funding for travel and accommodation for the accepted participants.

Participants were selected based on their application documents.  The high number of 102 applications from all Central Asian countries shows a continuing interest in the CAWa capacity building measures.

The Summer School introduced scientific concepts, methods and tools for the observation and analysis of water and land resources in Central Asia. These methods are of great value in a framework of integrated water and land resources management. The 2-week Summer School combined theoretical lectures and practical exercises as well as discussion sessions, which allowed to debate the potential of the methods for a sustainable water management. The program included an introduction to geographical-informational systems (GIS), an overview of remote sensing applications for land and water resources monitoring and an introduction into statistical techniques for the analysis of hydro-meteorological data using the statistical computation environment R.

The courses were given by researchers from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and the University of Wuerzburg with support of Central Asian co-trainers.