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President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new plan to address South Africa’s electricity crisis has been widely panned in the media as being ‘too little too late’ or lacking details or timeframes, but Mark Swilling, co-director of the Centre for Sustainability Transitions at Stellenbosch University, disagrees.

Mark Swilling speaks to the eNCA news team in his capacity as part of the National Planning Commission about a way forward for electricity generation in South Africa.

New processes and governance arrangements are urgently needed for dealing with potential trade-offs among mitigation options and their food security implications.

Transdisciplinarity distinguishes itself from mono-, multi- and inter-disciplinarity in that it – as research methodology – has developed specific principles, practices and methods of co-producing knowledge with social partners when facing real-world problem situations that are too complex to tackle with theoretical knowledge alone.

The Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST), in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) and Rhodes University, recently hosted a “hackathon” for an exciting new SES Methods website. This new website, expected to be launched mid-2022, is envisioned as a research commons with researchers all over the world working together to create useful resources related to Social-Ecological Systems (SES) methods.

The Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) invites applications for NRF-funded Masters and PhD bursaries for studies starting in 2023. The deadline for applications is 23 June 2022.

A major UKRI-GCRF funded research project “Supporting transformative adaptation and building equitable resilience to drought for sustainable development” aims to address the question ‘how we can manage droughts in a way to enhance social equity and build resilience at multiple scales?’ Using community-based and participatory research methods in four catchments in Kenya and South Africa, the project puts specific emphasis on marginalised farmers and aspires to understand why and how different social groups respond to and cope with droughts differently.

The huge cost of load shedding could have disastrous economic consequences and cause civil unrest that makes July 2021 pale into insignificance. If the problem is tackled realistically, purposefully and urgently with a coordinated emergency plan partnering Eskom and civil society, it is technically and financially possible to end load shedding within 24 months.

We seek motivated individuals interested to pursue a Masters degree linked to the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes initiative, who have a keen interest in sustainability, biodiversity and transition-related research, an interest and ability to integrate across the social and natural sciences, and who enjoy collaboration and working in teams.