Your Royal Highnesses, King Harald and Queen Sonja
Excellencies
Ministers
Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor
Staff and students
It’s an honour and a privilege to address you this morning.
On behalf of the people of South Africa, I would like to express our gratitude and special appreciation to the people of Norway for their sustained support of our efforts towards building a just, equitable and democratic society.
Last week your Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenburg, speaking at the London School of Economics about energy and the environment, made the key point that poverty and global warming are intimately interlinked.
We agree. We cannot address the one without addressing the other. The global challenge is deep and demanding. We cannot fight poverty without increasing the use of energy. As developing countries take their peoples out of poverty, there has been a strong growth in greenhouse gas emissions. We cannot stop development in the developing world, but we can control the emission of greenhouse gasses.
As a world leader in the export of oil and gas, Norway has recognised that it has a special responsibility in this regard. Consequently, Norway has become a world leader in clean technologies like carbon and capture technologies. We in South Africa want to learn from Norway in this regard and we signed an important carbon-capture memorandum of understanding with you yesterday.
Therefore, we value, in particular, our bilateral cooperation in the areas of science and higher-education research.
I have met Minister Aasland on a number of occasions in the recent past and as Minister of Education participated in the ten year celebrations of our education relationship in Oslo in 2007.
The contribution to our higher education system of Norway, through targeted programmes such as the South Africa Norway Tertiary Education Development Programme (SANTED), has been enormous.
Moreover, the South Africa Norway Programme on Research Cooperation coordinated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) on behalf of the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Education and the Research Council of Norway represents the most important institutional mechanism for research cooperation between South Africa and Norway.
I hope that we will see more South African researchers visiting Norway and more Norwegian researchers visiting South Africa, and that our relationship with the people of Norway will grow from strength to strength.
Thank you
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
25 November 2009
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za/)
