Reply To: Curricula review on Climate Change

[Anonymous]

#2750

What is known about the topic
– Climate change is a cross-cutting issue
– Climate is changing rapidly
– Adaptation to environmental hazards is critical and for that an ecosystem approach can be used to adapt to climate change
– Global model outputs are too coarse to inform local actions/interventions

What is not yet known
– The extent to which climate change will affect different sectors at local levels.

What is included in the subject curriculum
A topic on global warming and climate change to climate change is covered in the course titled ‘Physical and Human Environmental Systems’. The topic covers issues about the impacts of climate change and also adaptation measures and strategies. Issues on climate change mitigation are also dealt with. These are normally at global scale but these videos gives one the information that will assist in integrating climate projections for southern Africa as opposed to talking about the global projections, for example at global scale the 2 degrees Celsius temperature increase is often quoted while in the case of Southern Africa this may translate to a 4 degrees Celsius temperature increase.
Also, local level interventions have to be informed by information/outputs from regional climate models, so it is more appropriate to make use of regional model outputs as opposed to global model outputs which are at a rather coarse resolution.
There is more information on local impacts to refer to as opposed to the global impacts.