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The Green Economy
In 2012, UCT was awarded a DST/NRF South African
Research Chair in the Environmental and Social Dimensions
of the Bio-economy. The Chair is located in the Department
of Environmental and Geographical Science, and provides
an exciting opportunity to advance knowledge in this
newly emerging arena by catalysing the advancement of
research and understanding across and within disciplines,
building a critical mass of intellectual capacity, enabling
human capital development and in particular a new cohort
of skilled postgraduate students, and informing policy and
public debate in this rapidly evolving but underdeveloped
field. Its strong focus on engagement with communities,
indigenous knowledge holders, and policy-makers,
embeds within it a practice of engaged scholarship and
social responsiveness, with the objective of developing
a pioneering, highly collaborative and globally relevant
knowledge hub with international stature.
South Africa’s mix of developed and developing economies,
well-developed scientific and industrial infrastructure,
unique biodiversity and rich indigenous knowledge systems
provides an exceptional foundation for the research, which
focuses on four central themes.
The first theme centres on access and benefit sharing,
bio-discovery and the bio-economy, aiming to
strengthen the conceptual underpinnings of access
and benefit-sharing through enhanced understanding
of implications for commercial sectors involved in the
global and national bio-economy, and their responses
to environmental and equity considerations. The
research incorporates global reviews of the key sectors
(e.g. pharmaceuticals, herbal medicine, nutraceuticals,
industrial biotechnology, agriculture, personal care
and cosmetics, food and beverage) involved in the
commercial use of biodiversity, providing analyses
of the scientific and technological developments
that underpin bio-discovery, and the market, industry
and societal trends that drive demand for access to
genetic resources and shape benefit-sharing, economic
development and environmental sustainability.
The second theme links closely to the first, but with a
stronger focus on the broader use of biodiversity by
rural communities, and links to livelihoods and poverty
alleviation. The objective of this component of the
research is to deepen knowledge and understanding of
approaches to biodiversity use and trade that alleviate
poverty, reduce inequality and improve environmental
sustainability. Building on existing research, this objective
also has a strong creative component, revealing the stories
of indigenous plants, the communities that use them, and
the paths they travel as indigenous knowledge, identities
and resources are transformed into drugs, cosmetics,
food and flowers for the global consumer market. This
integrates a variety of disciplines in a holistic way –
anthropology, environmental science, botany, photography
and the assemblage of an important archive.
The third theme focuses on the elucidation of governance
approaches in Southern Africa that strengthen the rights
of custodians of biodiversity and traditional knowledge
holders, facilitate implementation of the Convention on
Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol, and stimulate
environmentally sustainable and socially just approaches
in the bio-economy. A second stream of research within
this objective investigates the so-called innovation chasm
between research results, commercialisation and socio-
economic outcomes, well recognised as a constraint
towards achieving significant outcomes of the bio-economy.
The fourth theme is an evolving one: to deepen
understanding of the environmental and social impacts
of emerging technologies within the bio-economy such
as genetic engineering, industrial biotechnology and
biofuel production.
The research agenda of the Chair, which has been filled by
Associate Professor Rachel Wynberg of the Environmental
EvaluationUnit (also see page 43) is strongly interdisciplinary
by nature, aiming to build UCT-wide collaborations in
addition to those at national and international levels.
Indeed, UCT is ideally placed to host the Chair since a wide
range of departments are engaged in aspects of the bio-
economy, located in almost every faculty across campus.
Activities include scientific research and development to
generate particular applications; ecological studies to
assess sustainable use; legal scholarship to investigate
intellectual property rights, traditional knowledge and
biosafety regimes; social science analysis to address the
myriad of questions raised by this field of enquiry; and
initiatives in the fine arts, reflecting the increasingconfluence
of arts and sciences to find innovative solutions to societal
problems. Obvious synergies exist with existing Research
Chairs in Drug Discovery (Chemistry), Bioprocessing
(Chemical Engineering), Customary Law, and Intellectual
Property Rights and Biotechnology (Private Law), as well
as the African Climate and Development Initiative. It is
intended that activities between these spheres will have a
synergistic effect, catalysing new areas of research inquiry
and stimulating transdisciplinary analyses that are often
difficult to undertake discretely.
The research agenda of the Chair is
strongly interdisciplinary by nature,
aiming to build UCT-wide collaborations
in addition to those at national and
international levels.