World Student Community for Sustainable Development

The WSC-SD is the official student partner for the upcoming 5th Humboldt | African Climate Change Conference to take place in Cape Town in January 2009. Registration is now open for this exciting event (http://www.humboldt5.uct.ac.za/), and the website also has further information on the conference.

“Iphakade” is isiXhosa (a South African indigenous language) for “observe the present and consider the past to ponder the future”. We consider this a particularly apt word to describe the intent of this 5th EGU Alexander von Humboldt International Conference which is to consider climate change in an Earth Systems context with a particular focus on Africa.

Humans have started to significantly alter earth’s natural systems and disturb their balances and there is an urgent need of deeper understanding of the system process and response to help reduce uncertainty and inform adaptation and mitigation options. Across Africa, communication systems, infrastructure, and management of natural resources must adapt to an environment that will be affected by changing sea levels, land management, magnetic fields, and climate system dynamics.

Because earth systems operate over very diverse spatial and temporal scales, it requires application of a wide range of specialist technologies to measure and model their interactions. Such activities are also the most likely to guide the basic science into exploring arenas of designated technologies and social problem solving. Such an environment would greatly enhance and grow existing emergent capacity.

Earth has a long history of pre-human climate changes, these should be analysed with greater curiosity and precision as cautious guides for the future: those who do not understand and remember the past are doomed to be caught by surprise. A critical role of this conference is to try and deepen the understanding of the interaction between earth system dynamics and anthropogenic earth system impacts, and to use this knowledge wisely to assess and economically evaluate global change induced by humans, with particular reference to Africa.