Johannesburg - In a bid to contribute to social change and support vulnerable communities, the University of South Africa (Unisa) College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has launched a Centre of Excellence: Adaptation and Resilience.
The vision of the centre is to provide cutting-edge research, best practices, education, leadership, support, and training in the areas of adaptation and resilience.
The Star attended the launch of the centre and spoke with Professor Llewellyn Leonard, Unisa Department of Environment Science: Advancing Social Change: Unpacking the Mission, Vision, and Purpose of the Centre of Excellence: Adaptation and Resilience, who shared details about the launch.
Llewellyn further explained the importance of the centre and said: “What is unique about this and why we started this centre is to actually contribute to social change. Academics are known as people who just do research, and we are working together with academics from different departments and some from across the country to formulate strategies with communities affected in terms of the challenges that they are facing and how we as academics, industries, and government can assist them. And that is why we started this centre — to actually contribute to social change as opposed to just research.”
“It is important because we want to use the research findings not only to contribute to social change, but if you look at climate change, it has all these impacts from the micro level to right at the bottom in food security, nutrition, water quality, and all these impacts. So we want to then inform policy as well, lobby government, and hold them accountable with our findings to contribute to social change.”
He further added that they hope that the centre becomes world-renowned and everyone knows about it, as they are set to document critical things and put the work out there.
Professor Monde Ntwasa, who is the Acting Executive Dean of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES) and a member of the CAES Community of Practice, commented about the launch of the centre.
“I think the importance of this is that South Africa, starting as a nation, starts to have a facility that is going to allow us to develop our own solutions to deal with the catastrophes and also the capacity to contain disasters. I think that is important for the country. Of course, for Unisa, because Unisa is a university with a great mandate from the government to do exactly those things to address national priorities, I think it is a priority,” said Ntwasa.
The Star