Cape Town water shortage crisis held up as an example at WEF
CAPE Town and its desperate battle to avoid running out of water is a climate change disaster, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has heard. At a WEF session on environmental risks, experts urged the world to move faster on climate change to avoid disaster, as extreme weather events and trends were becoming increasingly devastating and costly.
The session heard that while the world was still debating whether the change is real, weather migrants and refugees are becoming a reality.
Cape Town, one of the jewels in South Africa’s tourism crown, will become the first major modern city in the world to completely run out of water, if there is no sustained rainfall in the next short few months.
Day Zero – the day when taps run dry – has been moved forward to April 12 after it had been previously set at April 21.
Security forces, including police, the military, local law enforcement and traffic services have all been placed on standby to ensure the safe escorting of communal water resources and the monitoring of public water gathering points should the worst case scenario unfold.
Speakers at the WEF session on Wednesday said other parts of the world were facing weather-related crises on a similar scale and argued that there was insufficient urgency in meeting the goals on climate change set in the Paris Agreement, and that more radical measures were required to address the issues.
Peter O’Neill, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, said the climate issue had become more mainstream in conversations over the past few years but this did not help countries such as his, which recently experienced a long drought that precipitated serious food shortages.
He warned that climate change not only threatened communities, but also nations.
At least a third of countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific group of states, to which Papua New Guinea belongs, are in danger of disappearing as a result of climate change.
“The world seems to think they have time,” he said. “But there are real communities already suffering.”
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, co-ordinator of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT), said the rainy season in her country was now much shorter, causing hardship for local farmers. Lake Chad is an example of an extreme weather development, with 90% of the lake having evaporated over the past 40 years.
This has resulted in food shortages and an increase in conflict among lakeside communities over resources.
She said local solutions to the problem were necessary as countries could not wait for solutions to be crafted at a global level.
“It is difficult to change the consumer behaviour of people trying to survive. Energy is a luxury for a country like mine.”
She added her voice to the call for faster and more radical change to turn the situation around. Al Gore, former US vice-president and chairperson and co-founder of Generation Investment Management in the US, said humanity still had the opportunity to take control of its destiny but it would only happen if more people accepted the imminent danger and cost.
Philipp M Hildebrand, vice-chairman of BlackRock Inc, a global investment management firm, said the issues of the environment and sustainability needed to be pushed to the top of the corporate agenda as the problem was too large for governments alone to tackle.
“We need a new contract between capital, corporations and government,” he said. – African News Agency (ANA)