Climate Change: Universities Should Lead Research Effort

By Wagdy Sawahel 

The damaging heat wave which has been sweeping across North Africa during August and the United Nations scientific panel report which indicated that the entire African continent is highly exposed to climate extremes, have confirmed the important role of universities in mitigating the effects of climate change, overhauling societal indifference and scepticism about climate change and preparing students for future work in a world of climate breakdown.

Climatologist Coleen Vogel, a distinguished professor at the Global Change Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, told University World News that African universities need to lead the research effort to combat future climate change and to foster the development of innovative climate change technologies in Africa.

Similarly, David Ssekamatte, a consultant who lectures at the Uganda Management Institute and the author of the 2020 study “Towards a theoretical model linking university education to climate change interventions in the African context”, said African universities can integrate climate change and sustainability aspects in their study programme curriculums across disciplines “to enable them to produce graduates with knowledge, skills and attitudes to address climate change”.

Besides conducting scientific research and promoting innovation on climate change and sustainability, African universities can also engage communities on climate change and its impact as well as support community mitigation and adaptation interventions.

“African universities can integrate climate change and sustainability aspects in their study programme curriculums across disciplines to enable them to produce graduates with knowledge, skills and attitudes to address climate change,” said Ssekamatte.

Tristan McCowan, a professor of international education at the Institute of Education, University College London, said universities had a major long-term educational role to educate “the next generation of citizens and help them to acquire sustainability literacy, a grasp of the complexity of climate change and the political capacities to transform societies”.

McCowan is the lead editor of the 2021 report Universities Facing Climate Change and Sustainability. “Beyond this educational role, universities are also central to the task of generating the evidence-base needed to address environmental challenges, developing innovative technology and communicating with the public, in particular addressing the denial, scepticism and apathy that surrounds issues of climate and the environment more broadly,” said McCowan.

 Challenges in the climate change battle

But Ssekamatte said African universities faced several challenges in dealing with climate change. These include limited expertise on climate change science among staff; inadequate funding for climate research; high poverty rates that affect student enrolment, especially at postgraduate levels; and limited access to climate data due to poor research infrastructure in African countries. “The other key challenge is the negative attitudes among indigenous communities towards new climate change products and technologies produced by universities,” Ssekamatte added.

“Some ideas would include engaging their African governments to increase research funding for climate change; deliberate capacity building for their academic staff in climate change science; and sensitising communities on new products and technologies for mitigation and adaptation produced by the universities,” said Ssekamatte.

“University governance will be key in promoting university climate change and sustainable interventions and, therefore, African universities need to embed issues of sustainability in their governance systems and processes,” Ssekamatte concluded.

What is also necessary, said Vogel, was well connected networks with the Global North to ensure knowledge sharing and capacity enhancement – both from the north to the south and also south-south and south-north efforts, Vogel pointed out.

To deal with these challenges, Vogel said that the flow of resources from governments in Africa toward research and development and more co-designing and co-development of relevant and appropriate research agendas by research funders and donors were necessary.

Climate change ‘technologies’

Vogel said building African capacity in big data and high-performance computing infrastructure, climate modelling, and the overarching field of Earth System Modelling, should be a key technological objective of at least some African universities.

“There is also a wealth of domain expertise of the African climate system that needs to be consolidated in one or more African-based Earth System Models, thereby also decolonialising the field of climate modelling,” Vogel added.

“African universities may choose to contribute and lead in the new and rapidly growing field of technological innovation, including carbon dioxide removal technologies.

“Also important will be the restoration of soil carbon in agriculture and the restoration of ecosystems – here a competitive research advantage may already exist within African universities. Linked to these responses, much more research is also needed on the human dimensions in climate change,” said Vogel.

Professor Walter Leal, the head of the Research and Transfer Centre ‘Sustainability and Climate Change Management’ at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, told University World News that African universities are uniquely placed to act as centres for teaching and research for training students as well as providing support and advice to local governments in both policy-making and in addressing climate change problems.

“However, African universities need to interact more and integrate their work as well as making their expertise more widely known,” he said.