Fighting global crises together

Around 300 participants discussed issues related to climate protection and pandemic preparedness at the second that took place in Berlin in September 2024.  

Climate change is in full swing and has immediate impact on the ways in which we handle one of humankind's most important resources: water. “Astonishingly, not nearly enough attention has been paid to this to date,” said Professor Mukand Babel from the Asian Institute of Technology Bangkok (AITB). He already had the idea ten years ago to combine the two aspects in an inter-disciplinary study programme. In early 2024 this became reality: the Water Security and Global Change master’s degree programme was launched in cooperation with Dresden University of Technology, RWTH Aachen, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) and the Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources of the United Nations University (UNU-FLORES). ‘This is unique to date and I hope that we are encouraging the areas of academia and politics,’ the researcher from Thailand stated. 

Professor Babel attended the Global Centres Conference 2024 that took place in Berlin on 10-12 September 2024, as a representative of the Global Water and Climate Adaptation Centre (ABCD). (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst – DAAD) supports a total of eight of these globally active training and research hubs. The event in Germany’s capital city was the second large-scale meeting following the Opening Conference in September 2022, with the intention among other reasons, to take stock before the upcoming second funding phase: around 300 representatives from academia, politics and civil society discussed what is already working well and where there is room for improvement. 

Research with societal impact

The is not the only centre that is using funding from the DAAD to establish a new master’s degree programme. Five of the supported centres are offering new study programmes, and many of the participants acknowledged this as an initial success of the DAAD programme line. On the one hand, it is one of the key goals of the Centres to ensure that young academics are trained in a way that is as close as possible to the requirements caused by global crises, said Dr. Kai Sicks, Secretary General of the DAAD: ‘We want to create access to the global challenges that we are all affected by that is as direct as possible.’ On the other hand, running their own study programmes can help to secure long-term financing for the Centres, also beyond the end of funding, which many of the representative consider to be one of the key challenges. 

Promoting South-South cooperation

It is also helpful to develop an effective network. The Centres are doing very well in this regard, too, especially when it comes to establishing South-South cooperations for which the DAAD seeks to provide special support. Francisco Quiroga who attended the conference in his role as Mexican ambassador in Germany believes that academic networks in particular provide for a degree of stability and sustainability in international cooperation that cannot be realised through diplomatic relations alone. Christina Gehlsen, leader of the International Academic Policy section of the Federal Foreign Office agrees: ‘We can also see the importance of academic partnerships that are based on a community that is independent of the politics.” 

If the countries in question succeed to activate research capacities to fight these challenges jointly, the Global North will benefit, too. ‘The Global Centres in the South are helping the North to developing capacities, not the other way round,” pointed out Professor Thirumalaisamy Velavan from the Global Centre during a panel on the potential of South-South networking. 

Professor Francine Ntoumi, a representative of the Central African Infectious Disease and Epidemics Research Alliance  and the , mentioned another aspect: the structure of the Centres that are spread across a number of stakeholders and continents allowed for historic colonial ties to be overcome which had shaped cooperation between the Global North and South for a long time, she said. ‘We can see how effective it is to rethink such cooperation,’ the health researcher from the Democratic Republic of Congo stated. ‘In order to further increase networking opportunities, the conference was also open to climate and health researchers who take part in other DAAD programmes or receive funding from sister organisations such as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  

Exchange of knowledge and data

One of the key concerns of the Centres is to make scientific findings usable as quickly as possible. Nada Majdalani, head of the Palestinian NGO EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East and PhD student at the  is also committed to this goal. ‘I believe that the key to fighting climate change is dialogue: the exchange of knowledge and data,’ she said during a panel in which possible future scenarios in view of global crises were addressed, among other things. ‘There are so many amazing international initiatives that we should use to help people handle the climate change.’