Calls were made for climate change research, advocacy and action to be taken at the first COP25 conference hosted this week by the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate (GAUC) at the China Pavilion in Madrid, Spain.
Stellenbosch University (SU) and 11 other global universities participated in this conference, which was themed “University mission and action on climate change". This conference was a side event of the United Nation's two-week conference on climate change ending tomorrow.
Present at the event was SUN Zhen, Deputy General Director of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in China, who said in his opening remarks that he wished for GAUC to play a more important role in solving the challenges of climate change.
In his presentation at the conference, Prof Guy Midgley from SU spoke about South Africa's low-carbon transformation. Midgley is internationally recognised as an expert in the field of biodiversity and global change science. His primary research interests are plants, water and carbon relations – specifically photosynthesis and higher-order responses to elevated CO2 and climate change. He co-developed and published a synthetic modelling framework and tool (BIOMOVE) in 2010 for assessing population and geographic range change, which was successfully applied in California. He has led and contributed to several policy-related government reports and collaborated internationally on global change research themes in Chile, Australia, USA, UK, Germany, France, Botswana and Namibia.
At the conference in Cape Town, Prof He Jiankun of Tsinghua University highlighted that we had to take action now and that these actions had to be absolutely international and universities had to be part of them.
GAUC was formed earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland – during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum - with the goal of collaborating on promoting measures to support the United Nations conventions on climate change and Sustainable Development Goals. The founding alliance partners were Australian National University,; University of California, Berkeley; University of Cambridge; Imperial College London; London School of Economics and Political Science; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Tokyo and Tsinghua University. The additional four members invited to be part of GAUC were Stellenbosch University, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Indian Institute of Science and Sciences Po.
The mission of the Alliance is to advance climate change solutions through research, education and public outreach, and to collaborate with industry, non-profit and government organisations to promote rapid implementation from local to global scales. GAUC will pursue this mission by promoting exchange and cooperation among member universities and providing leadership for global higher education efforts addressing climate change.
Prof Hester Klopper, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Strategy and Internationalisation at SU, said at the inaugural meeting of GAUC SU was endowed with knowledge and expertise across a multitude of disciplines and SU's work on climate and sustainability, as well as its Campus Green initiatives would be a major asset to the Alliance.
