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Pat Manders |
By Pat Manders
Acting executive director, CSIR Natural Resources and the Environment
The CSIR has been involved in research into global change phenomena since the early 1990s, anticipating the growth in importance of these issues at national and international levels. With the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in full swing, these research efforts are now coming into fruition.
Global change issues are often highly complex and require extensive collaboration within the South African research community, as well as with multiple international partners. But collaboration is not sufficient. It is also necessary to put substantial effort into the integration of research efforts and outputs to provide relevant information that is usable by society to deal with the challenges of global change, now and in the future. In support of this approach, CSIR has been working closely with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) for some time and with particular focus since the publication of the Ten-year Innovation Plan, Towards a knowledge-based economy, published in 2008. The plan included global change as one of five Grand Challenges.
The CSIR contributed to the development of the Global Change Grand Challenge Research Plan and is aligning its research activities with the plan's four priority Knowledge Areas. The CSIR also participated in the establishment of ACCESS (The Applied Centre of Earth System Science), a collaborative initiative among several South African universities and research organisations. ACCESS is now a DST/NRF Centre of Excellence, hosted by the CSIR, and will be used as a platform to develop South African and international research programmes in support of the Grand Challenge. Currently, we are developing the South African Risk and Vulnerability Atlas (SARVA) for DST, again with the input of several South African research partners. The Atlas will be a repository of global change research, structured to provide usable information in support of adaptation responses.
This special edition of CSIR eNews provides a lot more background on these initiatives and also examples of research undertaken by the CSIR on global change, with an emphasis on climate change.
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