Most South African households and communities are struggling to survive. The worsening climate crisis makes this worse, with poorer communities bearing the brunt. In Durban, April 2022, over 500 people perished from a ‘rain bomb’, and in June 2025, over 100 people perished in the Umtata floods. Over the past few months, Limpopo has been flooded, drought has impacted the Eastern Cape, extreme temperatures have been experienced in the Northern Cape, and wildfires have devastated some small towns in the Western Cape. The death toll, infrastructure costs and injustice from unnatural climate disasters are increasing. South Africa is not prepared to deal with these climate risks. Students come from these places and also struggle with hunger, water, housing, transport, and many other challenges at the university. We are living in a post-normal South Africa and world. Leaders need to wake up.

Leading climate scientists and even the UN Secretary-General have declared the failure of the Paris Climate Agreement to prevent a 1.5 °C planetary overshoot (See CJCM's Call to Prepare South Africa for a 1.5 °C overshoot). Before this decade is over, the planet will experience a 1.5 °C overshoot due to the continued extraction and use of oil, coal and gas. By the 2040s, planetary temperature will exceed 2 °C. Southern Africa, including South Africa, is heating at twice the global average. Climate extremes will intensify, and feedback from tipping points and climate injustice will define the lives of the many. We are living in a post-normal world, defined by climate catastrophe, and we need post-normal universities that take the climate emergency seriously.

We acknowledge that WITS has been responsive to calls for a zero-waste, zero-hunger and zero-carbon university. WITS even has a Vice Chancellor for Climate, a Sustainability Strategy and several transdisciplinary research projects focusing on climate change. However, this is too little and not mainstreamed enough, such that WITS in its own right is demonstrating how to bring about a just transition now. The university is normalising the urgency of the climate crisis and failing to appreciate how deeply it is part of students' and staff's lived reality. Wits has a lot to offer the country to highlight the urgencies of the climate crisis and accelerate the deep just transition.

As climate-conscious students, the WITS Climate Justice Charter Movement society, we demand the following to realise a post-normal university:

1. Wits in its own right to convene a societal summit to share the urgencies of climate science developed by the research structures, such as the Global Change Institute (GCI);
2. To pilot a technical support node of students, institutions of Higher Education and climate scientists in Gauteng to work with communities, workplaces, and sectors to provide knowledge to accelerate the deep just transition through transformative adaptation, mitigation, and regeneration of life-enabling systems;
3. To support calls for a climate emergency social contract to accelerate the deep, just transition now in the country;
4. To support the summit on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels on April 28–29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia, and to send a delegation of students and staff. In addition, WITS to provide a plan to phase out the use of fossil fuels, reject funding from fossil fuel corporations, and to divest from fossil fuels;
5. To mainstream climate polycrisis pedagogy, transdisciplinary research and just institutional adaptation;
6. To have open dialogues with students regarding the impact of the climate crisis on their everyday lives.

Let’s unite for a post normal WITS university and for climate justice!