Professor Green will present her lecture on Tuesday, 14 May 2024 at 18:00 SAST in Mafeje Room, Bremner Building on lower campus. The lecture is titled “From Homo Economicus to Homo Sedimenta: Learning from the Failed Impact Assessments for Cabo Delgado’s Offshore Gas Projects, Mozambique”.

In 2011, offshore gas was found in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. Multiple violent events followed as the construction site progressed. The project was halted in 2022 when TotalEnergies declared force majeure. In a study of almost 5 000 pages of environmental and social impact assessment documents, Professor Green asks why the conflict was unforeseeable and makes the case that those in the environmental sector are relying on 21st century technologies to answer questions posed in 18th century disciplines. In the UN Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, 2024 to 2033, universities have the opportunity to build a peer-reviewable, accountable Big Picture Scholarship: a “meta-disciplinary” approach that builds habitability. In this lecture, Professor Green will look at how we might respond to this.

Professor Green is professor of Earth Politics and director of Environmental Humanities South (EHS) at UCT. Now in its 10th year, EHS has hosted students from 19 African countries and supports the emergence of an African ecopolitics. She is a former Fulbright scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Mandela Fellow at Harvard; Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Smithsonian, and Cheney Fellow at the Leeds Global Food and Environment Institute. Her research focuses on justice-based environmental governance sciences in Southern Africa. She was recently awarded a US 4.4 million grant by Science For Africa, for a five-country project along Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, to develop an African critical zone social science scholarship, in partnership with five African universities and the Human Sciences Research Council.

Date: Tuesday, 14 May 2024
Time: 18:00 SAST
Venue: Mafeje Room, Bremner Building