Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) is pleased to be partnering with the Omega Collaborative and Commonweal in executing the Omega Resilience Awards (ORA) programme through the Omega Resilience Awards – Africa (ORA – Africa) platform. We are excited about this journey towards unpacking the polycrisis with impulses drawn from the African context
HOMEF’s Ikike platforms provide a good basis for generating and sharing knowledge and moving the ORA idea forward. At the grassroots levels we host diagnostic Community Dialogues and Environmental Monitoring Training sessions. Our Schools of Ecology and Sustain-Ability Academies offer spaces for critical interrogation of complex sociology-ecological ideas and serve as platforms for engagements with policy makers, students, academics and the public.
The partnership with ORA comes at a time when it is generally agreed that the world is on track to catastrophic climate change if the current pace of carbon emissions release is not halted and reversed. While climate change is an existential crisis confronting the world, it is part of a complex of crises that could be imagined as an omni crisis — manifesting in multiple ways and affecting everything. The root of the climate crisis is the exploitation, consumption, and waste of natural resources; emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere majorly from the burning of fossil fuels—an investment trajectory with focus on dirty energy resources.
People in vulnerable nations are suffering the most as a result of global warming caused mostly by rapacious consumption and exploitation of the gifts of Nature. The impact of climate change is a living reality for communities across Africa where hazards and vulnerabilities often collide to produce disasters. Droughts, floods, water stress, salinisation of the oceans and coastal erosion are continuous threats. Understanding the phenomena that give rise to these crises and forging ways to reverse the trend are tasks that ORA Africa would pursue. We hope to witness, through the ORA A programme, original and innovative unpacking of the polycrisis from the global yet particularly African perspectives. We are moving to build a network of fellows that will be unpacking the dimensions of the polycrisis and do so while imagining the future. They may benefit from studying traditions and cultures in Africa including by studying subsisting concepts of well-being that are not predicated on growth, accumulation, or dispossession. Such concepts may include Ubuntu, Eti uwem and harambee. This way the wisdom from Africa will contribute to a more complete understanding of the polycrisis.
Learn more about the ORA Awards and the Omega partnership with HOMEF
