Developing Higher Education on Sustainable Development and Social Responsibility Using Digital Twin Tools

forthcoming

The countries of the South-Med area are characterized by a constant increase in population, challenge to ensure food security, reduction of agricultural land by desertification, change of water regimes and other climate change influences. According to Fetoni et all (2015) desertification costs for African countries is 9 billion US$ per year. In seeking answers to these challenges, human society relies on technological solutions of the digital revolution, where the first step is a comprehensive inventory of space and, based on it, modelling of various processes and predictions of possible scenarios of events. In the last ten years, the digital revolution has enabled the rapid development of the Digital Twin concept. The Digital Twin is a real-time synchronized virtual representation of a product, process or environment (Jones et all, 2020), which enable the creation of a model of reality in digital form with functionalities that enable the monitoring of changes, modelling of interventions and prediction of the consequences of any interventions in space. The Digital Twin in (smart) agriculture and related fields has found wide application (Purcell and Neubauer, 2023). However, the concept of Digital Twin, its development and application, requires prior interdisciplinary knowledge and skills that combine the understanding and ability to apply ICT, the collection, processing and interpretation of geospatial data, and domain knowledge in the field of application. As the concept of Digital Twins is new, it is not yet included in the curriculum in most HEI's worldwide. The DTT4DS project is designed to respond to some of those through the introduction of content related to the Digital Twin in the study programs of partner universities, The proposed Project activities take advantage of the expertise of the EU partners providing guidance on needs expressed by the South-Med partners,actively including student (survey, hackathon) and caring about gender equality.