Climate change is a significant threat to biodiversity. The effects are already being felt in many parts of the world, including Africa.
The impacts of climate change on biodiversity are often difficult to predict and can occur rapidly, sometimes over just a few years. This makes it difficult for us to prepare for what we may face in the future.
The good news is that there are ways you can help fight this threat to our planet’s most precious resources: plants and animals. For example, when you plant trees, you’re helping to conserve water, which means less runoff into waterways that feed into rivers and oceans. When you garden or do your own yard work, you’re helping the soil retain its nutrients so plants and grasses can recycle them, helping them grow better crops.
At Free Knowledge Africa, we believe everyone has a role in protecting our planet from climate change—and we want you to know how!
Hence, we are joining the 4-year Open Climate Change Campaign. Join us today by visiting this link.
Free Knowledge Africa joining the 4-year Open Climate Change Campaign, aims to share research outputs related to climate science openly. This campaign was launched by Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL.
Educating People about Climate Change
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, but it’s also one that many people don’t know enough about.
How will we fight climate change if we don’t know what’s causing it? How can we bring more people into the conversation and empower them to take action? And why aren’t more people talking about this issue?
We believe that we need to do a better job of educating people about climate change. We want people to be able to talk about this problem with their friends, family members, and colleagues, not just with strangers on the internet. We want them to see the facts for themselves so they can make informed decisions about how they will live their lives.
When you think of biodiversity, what do you think of it?
Do you picture the adorable little green frogs you see every spring in your local park? The brightly colored birds that flit around in your bird feeder? The colorful butterflies that gracefully dance across your backyard lawn?
In fact, according to the United Nations Report, there are about 8 million animal and insect species on Earth—and they’re all connected. That means that when one species suffers from climate change, so does the whole community of life.
The effects of climate change are felt in many ways: rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns can affect habitats and food sources for animals, which can affect populations; changing weather patterns can make it harder for animals to find enough food or water, and rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere may make plants more susceptible to disease or pests.
These points have therefore brought a call for action from various angles, which can only be achieved through multidisciplinary research.
This is the goal of this campaign. To push forward, open reach to research, knowledge, data, and other resources that can help to solve the current climate issues and help preserve global biodiversity.
The Goal of the Campaign is to:
- Bring attention to the difficulty of access to data on global climate change, particularly among researchers producing it, and inform them of tools that can open their research outputs.
- Work directly with national governments, funders, and environmental organizations to spot legal and policy barriers; assist governments in developing, adopting, and implementing equitable open access policies to overcome them. And also make it easier for climate change research, data, and educational resources to be shared.
- Identify, engage in, and contribute to the development of international frameworks that include funder open access policy recommendations and promote the public benefits of open access knowledge.
- Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications that are not already open access, and unbind those seminal publications so that they can be made open access.
- We will also investigate strategies for influencing publisher actions to ensure that future climate and biodiversity research is open access.
- Engage researchers, universities, and policymakers from traditionally excluded groups and geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes all the way through.
We strongly believe this open access and mobilizing of researchers, governments, funders, and organizations will help bring awareness about climate change and protect the world we love.
