Flooding, storms, droughts, and heatwaves have become common occurrences across the globe. Each time an extreme weather or climate event strikes, the same question arises: is this climate change? Weather and climate experts are often cautious in answering this directly, because linking a specific event to climate change requires detailed scientific analysis known as attribution studies. These studies examine how human-driven climate change alters the likelihood or intensity of specific extreme weather events.
The findings are increasingly clear. The 2015–2017 drought that led to the Cape Town water crisis was made three times more likely by climate change. The devastating floods of April 2022 in KwaZulu-Natal, which claimed over 430 lives, were found to be twice as likely to occur due to climate change. More recently, flooding across Limpopo, Mpumalanga and neighbouring countries has been associated with increasingly intense rainfall events. The characteristics of weather and climate events are already changing.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strengthened this message over successive assessment reports. Average conditions are shifting, and extreme events are becoming more frequent and more intense. In Southern Africa, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, increasing the likelihood of heavy rainfall. Slow-moving systems, cut-off lows, and tropical disturbances release large volumes of rain over the same areas for prolonged periods, heightening flood risk. When combined with rapid urbanisation, informal settlements in high-risk areas, and existing socio-economic vulnerabilities, weather hazards become disasters.
What is discussed far less frequently is how these same climate shocks disrupt education. Recent flooding across several parts of South Africa has once again made visible what climate science has warned for years. Heavy rainfall linked to slow-moving weather systems and saturated catchments has overwhelmed infrastructure, damaged homes, and cut off access to basic services. These impacts are often discussed through the lenses of disaster management and humanitarian response. Much less attention is given to the ways in which they interrupt teaching, learning, research, and student success.
For universities, climate change now represents a systemic risk rather than a distant environmental concern. At the University of South Africa (UNISA), floods translate directly into academic disruption. Students lose electricity and internet connectivity. Learning materials are damaged or destroyed. Homes, particularly in rural and informal settlements, are flooded or rendered uninhabitable. Mobility becomes restricted. Within an open distance learning environment, these disruptions sever the very links that enable learning to take place. Climate shocks, therefore, become academic shocks.
Scientific capacity helps explain why this is occurring, but it also reveals where institutional responses must evolve. One of the most effective ways to reduce the impact of disasters is through early warning systems. Many atmospheric conditions that lead to floods, storms, and heatwaves can be predicted days in advance using numerical weather prediction models. South Africa’s recent floods, linked to a slow-moving tropical system, were identifiable before landfall. The South African Weather Service issued impact-based forecasts that communicated not only what the weather would be, but what it would do. Despite these efforts, lives were lost. This suggests that somewhere along the early warning value chain, a breakdown occurred.
The United Nations Early Warnings for All initiative, launched in 2022, aims to ensure that every person on Earth is protected by early warning systems by 2027. Its four pillars — disaster risk knowledge, observations and forecasting, warning dissemination, and preparedness and response — apply equally to educational resilience.
Disaster risk knowledge requires understanding where people and infrastructure are most vulnerable. For an institution such as UNISA, this includes knowing where students live, which areas are flood-prone, and where energy and connectivity vulnerabilities are concentrated.
Observations and forecasting depend on scientific capacity. Weather stations remain sparse across parts of Africa, radar coverage is limited, and modelling systems require continued investment. Universities contribute directly to strengthening this scientific foundation through research in weather and climate modelling, hydrology, earth observation, data science, and environmental management.
Warning dissemination highlights the communication challenge. Even when warnings are issued, they may not reach the right communities at the right time or in accessible formats. In education, the equivalent challenge lies in ensuring that information about disruptions, extensions, and academic support reaches students who may already be disconnected.
Preparedness and response ultimately determine whether information becomes action. In disaster management, preparedness saves lives. In higher education, preparedness protects learning. A climate-resilient university extends beyond reactive measures such as emergency extensions. It involves anticipating risk using scientific evidence, integrating that knowledge into institutional planning, and designing systems capable of absorbing and adapting to disruption.
Viewing resilience as a systems challenge shifts the focus further. Climate impacts are mediated through energy systems, water availability, housing quality, transport networks, and digital connectivity. Students living in precarious housing, relying on unstable electricity supply, or sharing limited digital resources face elevated risks of academic interruption. Without intentional institutional strategies, climate change deepens existing educational inequalities.
For an open distance learning institution with a continental footprint, these challenges intensify. UNISA’s students are distributed across diverse climatic zones and socio-economic contexts. Flooding in Limpopo, storms in KwaZulu-Natal, drought in the Eastern Cape, or heatwaves elsewhere on the continent differ in form, yet often generate similar educational consequences. A climate-resilient university must therefore remain spatially aware, data-informed, and flexible.
Universities also carry responsibilities beyond their own operations. As centres of knowledge and training, they shape the skills base required for climate adaptation across society. Graduates with an understanding of climate risk, infrastructure resilience, food and water systems, energy transitions, and environmental governance contribute directly to long-term societal resilience. Capacity development, therefore, functions as a form of disaster risk reduction.
This responsibility carries particular weight across Africa, where observational networks remain sparse and research capacity uneven. Strengthening local scientific expertise ensures that early warning systems, climate models, and adaptation strategies reflect local realities rather than external approximations.
In a changing climate, saving lives will increasingly depend not only on predicting the weather but on investing in the science, capacity, governance, and systems that translate prediction into action. The same principle applies to higher education. Protecting learning requires linking climate science, institutional planning, digital systems, and student support into a coherent chain of resilience.
Climate change is reshaping the conditions under which both communities and universities operate. The challenge is no longer whether extreme events will occur. It is whether our early warning systems, our governance structures, and our universities are prepared to respond with the speed and depth required to protect both lives and learning across South Africa and the African continent.
By: Prof MJ Bopape Distinguished Professor CSET; Prof B Mamba Executive Dean CSET; Prof N Mapholi Acting Executive Dean CAES; Prof S Dube Deputy Executive Dean CSET; Prof A Gunter Acting Deputy Executive Dean CAES
