Farming for Climate Justice is a collaboration between CAWR and the University of Cape Town and is funded by the British Council’s Research Links Climate Challenge Fund. As such, it is designed to focus on three of the COP26 key themes (resilience & adaptation, nature and finance) and will contribute research outputs for COP26 in November 2021.
The project provides an opportunity for early career researchers from South African and UK – academics and civics – to collaborate on and co-produce research that bridges different ‘ways of knowing’ and to engage with deliberative processes across disciplinary perspectives to enable explorations of food and farming systems exposed to the climate and biodiversity crises.
With a focus on re-orientating resourcing for agroecological transitions to stimulate adaptation and resilience, these are already promoting critical ECR collaborations to produce a cohesive body of work that connect natural and social sciences, rural and urban spaces, North and South.
Farming for Climate Justice runs from March 2020 until March 2022, and kicked off with these three public-facing webinars:
Week 1: Resilience & Adaptation – Agroecological Systems, Climate Disruption & Urbanisation
(Wed 19th May 2021)
Bastien Deppois (CAWR) considered climate change impacts on agroecosystems and forecasting across different timescales. This session set the scene by introducing climate science and adaptation scenarios. And Gareth Haysom from the African Centre for Cities (UCT) presented on urbanisation and its uneven impacts and pressures on farming systems – using case studies from South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Week 2: Nature-based Solutions: Old Wine, New Bottles?
(Wed 26th May 2021)
This was a panel discussion with Rachel Wynberg (UCT), Michel Pimbert (CAWR), Jasber Singh (CAWR), Mvu Ngcoya (UKZN) and Million Belay (AFSA).
Week 3: Agroecology Resourcing Towards Economies of Care & Justice
This final session in the series was a discussion between Vanessa Farr (UCT) and Nina Moeller (CAWR) on how the concept of ‘slow violence’ can be applied and adapted to inform our understanding of the present industrial food system – moving us to consider how alternative economic systems represent important transitions towards economies of care, and social and environmental justice.