Beginning next academic year, the University of Ghana (UG) will operate a collegiate system, Professor Ernest Ayittey, Vice Chancellor (VC) has announced.
Under the system, Faculties and Departments would be merged to form four colleges, to facilitate the achievement of the vision of attaining a World Class university status.
Prof Ayittey announced this in a speech read on his behalf at the launch and inception workshop of the Deltas, Vulnerability and Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA) project.
He the University had undergone changes since its establishment about 65 years ago to become a top notch institution.
DECCMA from the Deltas are economic and environmental hotspots and often support high population densities estimated at over 500 million people globally, with particular concentration in South, South East and East Asia and Africa.
The just under five-year DECCMA project will examine how people are adapting to the physical effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, alongside socio-economic pressures, including land degradation and population pressure, in delta regions.
The project aims to develop methods to predict how these four deltas may evolve in the next 50 to 100 years and provide Government with the knowledge and tools to ensure future policy can maximise planning services and programmes to the benefit of the region’s population.
The Vice Chancellor said UG has identified Climate Change as one of its four Research Clusters and has constituted the Trans-Disciplinary Research Group on Climate Change with focus on four key areas, namely: climate Change and Health, Climate Change and Water Resources, Climate Change and Society, and Climate Change Innovation with emphasis on Green Economy.
The university has provided the group a seed fund of One Million Ghana Cedis for the next academic year, and the activities of the research group are expected to complement ongoing Climate Change initiatives at various units in the University of Ghana, he said.
“The $1.1M DECCMA project is therefore very timely. It will add up to the various cutting edge climate change research activities in the University,” he said and added that the project, which is looking at migration as an adaptation option for the Volta delta and other deltas in Africa and Asia, will provide information for effective management of resources in the deltaic regions.
He said in addition to providing policy direction to the three doctoral researches in the Departments of Economics, Marine and Fisheries Science and the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS) in the University of Ghana, The DECCMA project will also facilitate collaboration between the University of Ghana and other institutions in Africa, Asia and Europe.
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