A Swansea University researcher has just completed a six-week placement with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) in Namibia, southern Africa, examining the nature and extent of climate change in the country and how climate change is likely to affect VSO’s work there.
Dr Mary Gagen, a Research Councils UK Fellow and Senior Research Officer in the University’s School of the Environment and Society, took up the Welsh Assembly Government sponsored placement through the International Learning Opportunities programme, which is funded under the Wales for Africa Framework.
Dr Gagen, a palaeoclimatologist working on global climate change, has been based in VSO’s Namibia Programme Office in the country’s capital city Windhoek.
VSO currently supports work on education, secure livelihoods, disability and HIV and AIDS. Agriculture, health and natural resources management are all areas likely to be strongly affected by future warming and drying in this extremely arid country.
Dr Gagen said: “One of the problems is that Namibia already has a highly arid and highly variable climate naturally. Some years are really very dry and in others there are large floods, so it’s a challenging country to farm in and most of the population are subsistence farmers.”
Community-based tourism initiatives and the management of natural resources – including wildlife and plant life – are also likely to be strongly affected by climate change in the future and tourism is one area where Namibia has really benefited from income generating activities in the recent past.
“I’m delighted to have had this opportunity to employ and transfer the skills and expertise I have developed through my academic work at Swansea in my work with VSO,” said Dr Gagen, aged 35, from Mumbles.
“Climate change is an increasingly important issue for policy makers, governments, non-governmental organisations, and charities around the world. VSO is aware of the significance of climate change as an important issue in international development, largely because the poor will be disproportionately affected by it.
“It’s important to the work that VSO does in Namibia to development an assessment of the likely impact of climate change on disadvantaged, rural-based communities. Part of my project will involve making recommendations for how VSO might start to work with Namibian groups towards climate change adaptation.”
Dr Gagen, who is due to return to Swansea later this week, has been blogging from Namibia and you can read about her experiences at http://marygagen-in-namibia.blogspot.com/.
For more information of the work of VSO in Namibia, visit http://www.vso.org.uk/where-we-work/namibia.asp, and for more information about the School of the Environment and Society at Swansea University visit http://www.swansea.ac.uk/environment_society/.
