Hon Chairperson, I move without notice:
That the House -
1) notes the launch of the Africa Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (Access), which will provide regional decision-makers with reliable climate information, enabling them to balance developmental needs with responses to threats posed by environmental change;
2) further notes that Access is a consortium of research institutions and agencies that have signed up to contribute to a whole greater than the sum of their parts including the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Western Cape, Pretoria, Stellenbosch, KwaZulu-Natal and Rhodes, along with the SA Weather Service, SA Biodiversity Institute, Agricultural Research Council, Geosciences Research Council, SA Environmental Observation Network, and the hosts of the centre, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), while the secretariat will be set up at the Centre for High Performance Computing at the CSIR Campus in Rosebank, Johannesburg; and
3) welcomes the collaboration amongst our research institutions which have already implemented a research programme with several projects focused on a number of earth system issues, a services programme that will develop a series of products for use by service providers and an educational programme that includes a bursary, winter school and a national master's degree programme.
Agreed to.