Climate crisis ‘largely responsible’ for UCT fire, study finds

Weather that caused 2021 inferno at top South African university “very likely” to happen again

Climate change was “largely responsible” for the extreme weather conditions that caused the runaway wildfire that gutted a historic library and damaged buildings at the University of Cape Town’s upper campus in April 2021, research has found.

The study, by Zhongwei Liu, a doctoral candidate at Coventry University in the United Kingdom, and Stefaan Conradie, a PhD student at UCT’s Climate Systems Analysis Group, used climate model projections to reach their conclusions.