Climate change tops BRICS young scientist’s forum in Gqeberha

Climate change was on top of the agenda of the second day of the BRICS young scientist’s forum in Gqeberha.

The forum started on Monday bringing together more than 200 young minds from the BRICS group.

The aim of the forum and the discussions are to find solutions to many of the problems facing the world, including climate change.

The Deputy Director-General for International Cooperation and Resources in the Department of Science and Innovation, Daan Du Toit, says the issues on the table are shared by all BRICS members.

“We have focused discussions on some of those key societal issues, which are shared by all the BRICS countries.  Such as, for example, our response to climate change. How do we make our management of natural resources more sustainable or indeed how do we understand the future of society in the age of technology disruption?”

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The Managing Director of the research foundation, the South African Environment Observation Network, Dr Mary-Jane Bopape, says BRICS countries need to work together to come with solutions to climate change.

“The BRICS countries need to collaborate on both mitigation of climate change and that would involve working together, collaborating to ensure that there is more renewable energy, there is more clean energy in all the BRICS countries.”

Bopape adds that developing countries tend to have provided a small contribution to climate change solutions, and it is now time for them to step up.

“Developing countries themselves have contributed very little to the climate change that we are experiencing. Which means we need to invest a whole lot on adapting to climate change, one of the areas is just ensuring that we’ve got proper observation networks, we’ve got proper models that can focus and we also have platforms that can disseminate the information and we need to work together to ensure that we are climate resilient, we are ready also with our infrastructure to deal with the future climate.”

The BRICS young scientist’s forum wraps up on Wednesday.