Date: 10/03/2010
Source: the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs
Title: SA: Sonjica: Address by the Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs, to the South East African Climate Consortium, Port Elizabeth

Programme Director
Vice chancellor of NMMU Professor Derrick Swartz
Vice Chancellor of the University of Fort Hare, Doctor Mvuyo Tom
Vice Chancellor of the University of Rhodes Dr Saleem Badat
Sir David King of the Smith School of Environment and Enterprise at Oxford
University
Professor from University of Oldenburg, Joachim Peinke
Leadership and academia of the Nelson Mandela University
Leadership and academia of Rhodes University
Leadership and academia of Fort Hare
Representatives of the Seas Trust and the Wilderness Foundation
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen.

Molweni, good morning, goeie more!

It is with profound gratitude that I accepted your invitation to address
this auspicious gathering here today. Programme Director, allow me to
congratulate the founding partners of this consortium, i.e. the Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan University, Rhodes University, University of Fort Hare,
the Sustainable Seas Trust and the Wilderness Foundation on the profound
initiative taken to form a platform to deal with climate change, mitigation
and adaptation issues.

This initiative here in the Eastern Cape, a province with high levels of
poverty, many water challenges, but yes splendid beauty and biodiversity,
comes at a time when we need the academic institutions of your calibre,
particularly as previously disadvantaged institutions, to become more
involved on matters pertaining to climate change. As government we welcome
such initiatives that form a partnership that can provide a nexus between
academia, government and business.

More profound is your aim as the consortium to use your strengths in
communication and education to reach the people of southern and eastern
Africa, particularly within the Eastern Cape, to measurably change behaviour
thereby lead to sustainable livelihoods, sustainable development and an
improved quality of life for all.

Programme Director, as the Department of Environmental Affairs we believe it
is long overdue that partnerships need to be formed with government to
provide the knowledge that might guide planners and managers in urban, rural
and coastal areas, produce graduates and postgraduates in climate change,
share expertise cost-effectively in teaching undergraduates and
postgraduates, as well as promote public awareness and inspire actions for
sustainability among everyone. I would certainly want us to practically
engage with one another again beyond this meeting and concretely put
together a plan of action.

Public awareness of climate change, and its solutions, is worryingly low.The
voice of previously disadvantaged universities is sorely missed in the
entire spectrum of the evolution of climate change decisions and therefore I
am confident that this initiative is a step in the right direction.

There is a clear need for government to build public support for climate
policies that will enable us to deliver on our national objectives of
creating decent work, overcome the challenges in education and health,
address land and rural developments and in so doing not to forget to tackle
crime.

Ladies and gentlemen, South Africa is an energy intensive and coal dependent
economy. As such we are a greenhouse gas intense economy. At the same time
we are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly if global
temperatures rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050. Being a
responsible global citizen in the climate change challenge means, we must
act and contribute to a world that ensures that the impact of greenhouse
gasses does not lend us into a situation where we cannot adapt to changes in
climate from historical industrialisation.

As a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), South Africa is equally committed to carrying out its
responsibilities within the framework of the Convention and in accordance
with the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibility.
We also believe that climate change, if left un-mitigated, has the potential
to undo or undermine many of the positive advances made in meeting South
Africas own development goals and the Millennium Development Goals.
Government further acknowledges that climate change adaptation, dealing with
the unavoidable impacts of climate change, is a mechanism to manage risks,
adjust economic activity and development plans and reduce vulnerability.

We believe that the Copenhagen Accord that came out of the Climate Change
talks in December last year - which is a political agreement - can
contribute towards a multilaterally agreed outcome and must be concluded
within the next year or two. If Mexico cannot deliver this much anticipated
legally binding deal when it hosts COP 16 in December this year, all hopes
will be pinned on South Africa when we host COP 17 next year.

Climate change threatens to undermine many of the UNs Millennium Development
Goals, including that of eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, with severe
consequences for the worlds poorest people, millions of whom may be forced
off their land and become climate refugees. It is for this reason that as
South Africa together with the African continent we hold the firm view that
the developed countries should accept greater responsibility for assisting
developing countries to adapt to climate change, while ensuring climate
policy directly contributes to poverty eradication. To this end, developed
countries need to achieve a step-change in their efforts.

As many of you would know, The Department of Environmental Affairs is the
lead agency for directing and formulating the national climate change
response programme and has the responsibility of ensuring that South Africas
obligations in terms of the UNFCCC and the IPCC are fulfilled. DEA is
represented on the National Committee of Climate Change (NCCC) which has a
number of government departments represented as well as industry, NGOs,
research and parastatals. The participation of all sectors of our society in
this structure is important, particularly that this year we intend gazetting
the National Climate Change Response Policy.

Programme Director, in looking at the role of universities, I wish to
highlight that a significant body of evidence points to the threats that the
African continent faces due to climate change. Several efforts are underway
already to support adaptation research and action, but capacity remains
limited as the challenges mount. Thus, my aim in targeting university-based
actors like yourselves and say that we need to urgently build sustainable
capacity to deal with global environmental change over the long term.

This will contribute to the strengthening of the African voice in
international climate change and global environmental change discussions. We
believe that African intellectual products should be informed by local needs
and should inform simultaneously the development of local and international
policy. We believe that we need to support movement beyond instinctive
responses from communities at risk by supporting research, teaching and
outreach at universities. The universities need to also stimulate their
interaction with civil society, policy makers and communities and assist
communities with sustainable transformation of their practices in
consideration to global environmental change. The time has come to support
sustained academic efforts and to integrate non-academic professional inputs
into research and teaching.

As South Africa and Africa need science, monitoring and the creation of
knowledge bases, thus our partnership will contribute to meeting these needs
through university-based efforts. Building and supporting expertise to scale
up to address the bigger picture of mitigation and adaptation and global
environmental change will require embracing new agendas and interacting with
a range of actors.

We would like to support the need to capture indigenous knowledge and build
that indigenous knowledge as legitimate. We therefore wish to support a
long-term engagement with a pragmatic vision that builds on existing and
emerging capacity that will be inventive and creative and push boundaries in
its work. We are looking to create networks and build a network of networks
working on the continuum of university-centered and NGO activity related to
climate change adaptation and global environmental change.

Why do we need to engage the universities, ladies and gentlemen? We know
that universities are currently slow to respond to climate change adaptation
and mitigation challenges for a number of reasons. Some university leaders,
for example, believe that climate change adaptation efforts are beyond the
universities mandates. However, we believe that work needs to be done to
speed up the universities responsiveness and responses to climate change as
essential developments in building sustainable adaptation capacity are
required. We see universities as offering better economies of scale in using
existing organizational, intellectual and financial resources.

Our partnership, we trust, will speak to broad challenges of African academe
today. From questions of relevance of research to economic development to
the role that higher education should play in society as it faces climate
change challenges. I dare say that our partnership should help transform the
higher education landscape even through this specific effort to build
climate change adaptation capacity.

This work will need to address challenges of enhancing and, in some cases,
changing centrally-defined academic programmes and also the real need to
adjust approaches to teaching and learning. And as collaborative work almost
by definition spawns better analytical approaches to complex problem
solving, the trans-disciplinary nature of adaptation will require new
approaches and spaces for collaboration.

We understand that the nature of education at present does not, in some
cases, support collaboration, hence we need to build a culture of shared
thinking and collaboration. It is important for South Africans to have a
more assertive international presence to improve the quality of the global
discussions. Backing this up with clusters of colleagues working together at
established institutions will help anchor the South African, the African
voice, and at the same time it provides space for sharing multidimensional
ideas that cut across sectors and traditional lines of thinking. This
approach is one that I will engage further on with my Cabinet colleagues in
Education.

Ladies and gentlemen, strengthening capacity of African universities to
embrace and be involved in global change research is essential. While we see
a number of excellent researchers who are affiliated with academic
institutions, their work is not necessarily appreciated or even welcome at
the institutions where they are teaching and researching. This situation
exacerbates the already critical but fragile existing knowledge gap in
climate science and global change science. The climate science first
developed with simple modelling of carbon dioxide and temperature in the
late 19th century, which developed to include the land mass in the late 60s,
and further included the oceans in the late 80s.

The future of the science is in how these changes relate to specific
resources, such as water, biodiversity, as well as to the economy and social
organisation. We must work to develop and demonstrate the emerging
intellectual leadership in climate change that is both based at institutions
of higher education and embraced by institutions hosting this leadership.

Part of the outcome of this engagement has to result in a skilled pool or
cadreship of previously disadvantaged individuals who can contribute into
the larger climate change debate. This will ensure that the African child
will assist his/her community especially as they will be having a profound
understanding of the ways of life of the communities they come from.

Through the proposed network with universities, we will build the profile of
climate change adaptation as a legitimate focus for scholarship, teaching
and research and therefore begin the self-perpetuating intellectual endeavor
of continuing to train future generations of scholars, researchers,
practitioners and policy makers who will carry forward Africas work in
climate change adaptation and global environmental change.

Programme Director, I also welcome indications of interest in this work from
civil society organizations, NGOs and other knowledge platforms that might
wish to engage in this work but do not yet have established partnerships
with university-based efforts.

These indications of interest will be matched, where possible, to
university-based proposals. I have said earlier on that we need to engage
again after this meeting, so let me share some thoughts on what ideally we
can begin to support each other on:

*relationships with other organizations and knowledge platforms and ideas
for other/alternative ways of sharing information and gaining knowledge and
how these will feed into the emerging work
* a vision for enhancing university teaching and research with community
outreach, short-term training with various relevant constituencies, policy
proposals and interventions, and how all of this work is complementary and
mutually reinforcing in building the science/policy/practice interfaces of
adaptation
* a plan for how the work will extend beyond the proposing institution to
benefit a wider audience
* a plan for adapting research products into policy briefings of use to
government, business and other stakeholders
* a plan for action-oriented research for use at grassroots level amongst
others.

Our aim is not to be interventionist, but we see opportunities to connect
identified winning edges as an important part of this effort. I am confident
that we can do it.

Programme Director, distinguished guests, in this context, on the 6th
December 2009 on the eve of the Copenhagen Talks, President Zuma announced
that South Africa would take nationally appropriate mitigation action to
deviate its emissions trajectory relative to Business As Usual (BAU) by 34%
by 2020 and 42% by 2025. As outlined in the UNFCCC and agreed in the Bali
Action Plan the extent to which this action can be implemented depends on
the provision of financial, technology transfer and capacity building
support. Therefore, this support needs to be delivered through an ambitious,
fair, inclusive and effective international climate change regime, which now
has to be agreed to in Mexico in December 2010.

This year we will ensure that we conclude the National Climate Change Policy
and White Paper by the end of this year (2010), with a draft Green Paper to
be drafted in the first quarter of the year. This policy development process
builds on the Long Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) study on mitigation and
an understanding of our vulnerability as outlined in the Second National
Communication (SNC). This policy aims to provide leadership and be an
enabler to government, academia, business, and civil society broadly on how
as a country we will respond to challenges of climate change. The policy
will however be preceded by a broad consultative process directed towards
both getting input for the policy positions in the Green Paper, as well as
being used to build a broad understanding of the potential consequences of
climate change for South Africa into the future.Surely your contribution
will be expected and highly appreciated.

In conclusion, Programme Director, Climate change is the defining human
development issue of our generation. It with this in mind, that we must
include a gender dimension to climate change. While underscoring the
vulnerability of poor women to climate change, it should also be
acknowledged that women play an important role in supporting households and
communities to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Across the developing
world, womens leadership in natural resource management is well recognized.
For centuries, women have passed on their skills in water management, forest
management and the management of biodiversity, among others. Through these
experiences, women have acquired valuable knowledge that will allow them to
contribute positively to the identification of appropriate adaptation and
mitigation techniques, if only they are given the opportunity.

Again, ladies and gentlemen, my sincerest appreciation for inviting me and
for the acknowledgment that together we can do more. May I wish you all the
success with the rest of the conference.
We are excited that Minister van Schalkwyk has been approached to take over
the position of Mr De Boer when it becomes vacant in July. Cabinet is fully
behind the possibility.

Thank you for your attention.