Africa’s climate crisis is no longer a warning written in the future tense. It is a lived reality unfolding across our farms, rivers, cities, coastlines and communities.

The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Africa 2025 provides sobering evidence. At least 13 million people across the continent were affected by extreme weather and climate-related events in 2025. Yet fewer than 40% of African countries report having the preparedness and response capabilities required for effective multi-hazard early warning systems.

These figures matter not simply because they are alarming. They tell us something deeper about the nature of the challenge before us. Climate change is not only an environmental problem. It is a systems problem.

When water systems fail, food systems are threatened. When extreme weather damages infrastructure, economies and livelihoods suffer. When communities lack access to reliable climate information, vulnerability deepens. And when governments, universities, businesses and communities work in isolation, even good ideas struggle to achieve meaningful scale.

This is why our response to climate change must increasingly focus on how we design the systems that sustain society.

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides an important framework for understanding this interconnectedness. Sustainable development goal (SDG) 13, Climate Action, cannot meaningfully be pursued in isolation from goals dealing with hunger, clean water, energy, innovation, sustainable cities, responsible production and partnerships.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are sometimes presented as 17 separate ambitions. In reality, they describe one interconnected human system. A climate-resilient community requires secure water, reliable energy, sustainable food production, functioning infrastructure, economic opportunity, knowledge and capable institutions.

Yet the world remains worryingly behind schedule. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025 found that only 35% of SDG targets were on track or showing moderate progress. As 2030 draws closer, this should not encourage us to abandon ambition. It should compel us to interrogate the gap between ambition and implementation.

The international climate agenda is already moving in this direction. The Global Goal on Adaptation, established under the Paris Agreement, seeks to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability. More recently, the adoption of the 59 Belém Adaptation Indicators has strengthened the global emphasis on measuring whether adaptation is actually happening.

That shift matters. What cannot be allowed is a world in which we become increasingly sophisticated at describing climate vulnerability while remaining painfully slow at changing it.

Financing is one part of this challenge. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that developing countries could require between US$310 billion and US$365 billion annually for adaptation by 2035, while international public adaptation finance flows stood at only US$26 billion in 2023.

But finance alone will not build resilience.

Money invested into fragmented institutions, weak governance or solutions detached from local realities will never deliver its full potential. Climate resilience requires the alignment of finance, science, technology, policy, infrastructure and community knowledge. It requires systems capable not only of responding to disasters but of anticipating risk.

Universities have a particular responsibility in building these systems.

Our role cannot end with producing research papers and graduating students. Universities must become active laboratories for societal transformation. Research must inform public policy. Innovation must respond to real community challenges. Data must improve decision-making. Technology must become accessible to those who need it most. Graduates must leave our institutions equipped not only with qualifications but with the capacity to solve complex problems.

This thinking informed the establishment of the International Conference on Climate Resilient, Smart and Sustainable Futures (ICCRSSF), whose inaugural gathering was hosted by the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) in South Africa in 2025.

For VUT, this conversation has particular meaning. Our university stands within the Vaal region, shaped by one of Southern Africa’s most important river systems. The Vaal River supports households, agriculture, industry and economic activity. It reminds us every day that environmental sustainability is inseparable from human prosperity.

A river does not recognise disciplinary boundaries. Neither does climate change.

From 12 to 14 August 2026, this conversation moves from the Vaal to Victoria Falls, where Great Zimbabwe University (GZU) will host the second International Conference on Climate Resilient, Smart and Sustainable Futures (ICCRSSF 2026) at Elephant Hills under the theme, “Designing Systems for Accelerating Climate Resilient and Sustainable Societies”.

The significance of this continuity should not be underestimated. Climate change does not respect national borders and neither should the search for solutions. The collaboration between universities and partners across Southern Africa and beyond reflects precisely the kind of regional knowledge ecosystem that the climate crisis demands.

ICCRSSF 2026 brings together questions that are too often discussed separately: climate financing and resilience, water and climate-proof food systems, sustainable development, just energy transitions, digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), climate information systems, legal and policy frameworks, heritage, tourism, education and youth leadership.

The challenge is to connect them.

Artificial intelligence, for example, will not become a climate solution simply because we describe it as innovative. Its value will lie in whether it helps a farmer make a better decision about water, enables a municipality to anticipate flooding, strengthens an early warning system or gives policymakers more reliable evidence on which to act.

Similarly, a just transition cannot be measured only by megawatts of renewable energy installed. It must also be measured by whether workers, communities and young people participate meaningfully in the economic opportunities created by that transition.

This is the thinking that must define the next era of climate action in Africa: solutions developed with communities, informed by African realities and capable of being implemented at scale.

ICCRSSF 2026 therefore matters not because the world needs another conference. It matters because we urgently need spaces where researchers, policymakers, industry, civil society, innovators, students and communities can challenge the boundaries that keep knowledge and implementation apart.

The true measure of the conference will not be how many papers are presented in Victoria Falls. It will be what happens afterwards: the partnerships established, research translated into policy, technologies tested in communities, young researchers developed, financing mobilised and solutions taken beyond university campuses.

From the Vaal to Victoria Falls, the message should be clear. Africa cannot merely adapt to a future designed elsewhere. We must bring our knowledge, institutions, technologies and communities together to design resilient futures for ourselves.

The climate crisis has given us enough warnings. The time for systems, solutions and action is now.

Professor Stephen Khehla Ndlovu is the vice-chancellor and principal of the Vaal University of Technology (VUT)