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Dr Lozelle Reed is an environmental and resource economist at the CSIR in Stellenbosch. |
South Africa's research capacity for dealing with the economics and sustainability of global change should focus more on adaptation than on mitigating the impacts. At the same time current research capacity in this field is limited, uncoordinated and fragmented.
In an audit for the Department of Science and Technology (DST), CSIR researcher Dr Lozelle Reed found that the 144 scientific articles published between 1992 and 2009 were primarily focused on the areas of mitigation, with very little done on impacts and adaptation to global change or estimations of the cost of global change on the economy.
"The lack or research in adaptation specifically is troublesome, given the fact that most of Africa's efforts are expected to be concentrated on adaptation measures due to the continent's low contribution to carbon emissions and high risk of vulnerability," Reed wrote in her report.
South Africa has research and development capacity in a number of 'isolated pockets', where cutting-edge research on the economics of climate change is conducted, specifically in the fields of energy and agriculture. However, the field of environmental and resource economics in South Africa is poorly capacitated at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels to deal with these problems.
During a symposium with experts and key stakeholders in the field, a general framework and common understanding of the term 'economics of global change' was established as: "the use of economic analysis to understand the constraining and enabling behaviours that contribute and respond to changes occurring in coupled human-biosphere systems in order to better inform South Africa's mitigation and adaptation responses and ultimately to make development in the region more sustainable."
Various short and medium-term plans for overcoming the gaps in existing research capacity are proposed in the final report.
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