AUC Launches Its Climate Change Initiative
The American University in Cairo (AUC) launched its Climate Change Initiative this month in response to worldwide climate change challenges and the active role academic and research institutions must play in understanding and addressing them. The initiative includes research, student activities, teaching and learning, outreach, tracking and reducing our carbon footprint, writing school textbooks on climate change and providing climate change solutions in specific contexts within the country. It draws on AUC's extensive international network and rests on the academic and research expertise of the University's departments and research centers.
“Our aim in this initiative is to reinforce AUC’s role as an active academic hub on climate change and sustainable development in Egypt and the region, as well as an active contributor to global efforts addressing climate change challenges,” said AUC President Ahmad Dallal. “Of course, COP 27, hosted in Egypt in November, provides an incentive to catalyze AUC’s climate change initiative.”
Dallal outlined the initiative's five main focus areas that align with national and regional climate change and sustainability priorities: water-related issues; green architecture and sustainable urban development; green finance; public health and energy transition.
These areas of focus also overlap with a number of “cross-cutting issues” ––adaptation to climate change, resilience of communities, mitigation measures, education and a just transition –– that are relevant to Asia and the region. “We encourage a multidisciplinary approach in addressing challenges, including policy, regulatory frameworks, financing, scientific research and social science aspects,” said Dallal.
UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for Egypt and Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund Mahmoud Mohieldin, the keynote speaker at the event, highlighted five distinctive features of COP 27, which AUC will participate in next fall, including firstly a holistic approach to climate change. "We cannot ignore poverty, hunger, job creation and an inclusive approach to the whole [climate change] agenda, including the impact of climate change on children, youth and women,” he said.
Discussing the implementation of previous promises outlined in the climate change agenda and action plan, Mohieldin said: "We don't need new frameworks; we need to apply what we have. If there is a good idea, let's projectize it. You [AUC] have good ideas, and you have been teaching about them, so [the focus now is] how to apply them on your scale, with the hope that this could be scaled up or replicated somewhere else.”
Mohieldin added that for the first time in the history of COPs, there is an alignment between the COP agenda, G13 and the rest of the SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals], with five major events to correlate the promise of finance coming from different institutions with the pipeline of projects, especially those focusing on mitigation, decarbonization and race to zero.