NEW DELHI: The League of Islamic Universities will launch environment courses at the campuses of its member institutions, following a climate action summit held in India earlier this week.
Based in Cairo, Egypt, the league is an association representing Islamic universities around the world.
Its members, including 200 universities from 60 countries, gathered at Jamia Markaz, an Islamic university in Kozhikode, Kerala, for the International Climate Action Summit on Oct. 17-20.
The event was inaugurated by the league’s secretary general, Dr. Osama Al-Abed, who urged global stakeholders to employ new strategies in addressing climate problems, as the world is “facing challenges that are structurally different from the past.
“Even a minor variation in the ecosystem in a remote village can have huge global impacts. The human population across the globe is now entangled with each other in unprecedented ways,” he said.
“This demands policymakers and governments to resort to more international approaches toward issues such as climate change and come up with global solutions for even local issues.”
The summit concluded with a joint declaration for climate action that obliges the league’s members to include environmental science in their curricula and allocate resources for research on confronting climate change-related problems.
“We thought that the real community who has to work on climate change is students. In every country, if the universities go for some course on climate then the future generation would be working on climate change,” Jamia Markaz rector Dr. Abdul Hakeem Al-Kandi told Arab News on Friday.
“Students, who are the future leaders, when they are getting aware of climate change, (they) will impact the whole world.”
Al-Kandi added that a center dedicated to environmental studies will be established by the league in Calicut, India.
“This would be part of the League of Islamic Universities,” he said.
“Anyone can come and study here.”
Environmentalist and principal of Markaz Law College Dr. C. Abdul Samad, who coordinated the summit, said the idea of the university league’s action was to mobilize community members in different societies and make them stakeholders in protecting the environment.
“Introducing environmental science courses in universities is important as the young leaders need to be educated to think about nature and climate change, and its impact,” he said.
“It is the new generation that can preserve the diversity of nature and respect the environment. The whole idea is to save the planet for the future.”
Saudi environmentalist Ahmed Sabban, who took part in the summit, also highlighted the urgency of climate action dedicated to the young generation.
“Let’s start teaching the environmental science courses to young graduates, because the universities are places where research and development, and professors and students, will come up with solutions quicker than other organizations,” he told Arab News, adding that such courses are already underway in Saudi universities.
“Educational institutions are bodies which will come with solutions. This is why it’s important for the new generation to understand and start helping, and think about this problem.”
