Time to think about unimaginable heat and building cooling centres for weak

IN THE hotter, drier South Africa of the near future, Dr Francois Engelbrecht imagines that massive “cooling centres” will be created to help protect low-income, vulnerable communities from extreme heat.

It’s a scenario that Engelbrecht, a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), believes is not far off.

“If you’re old, poor, you live in an informal settlement and if your children are not there to look after you when the heatwave strikes, to ensure you’re in a cooler place, then you’re in big, big trouble.

“We suspect at the CSIR that heatwaves, which are now rare on the continent, will become one of our biggest problems in terms of climate change. Perhaps, in the future there will be these cooling centres here where the vulnerable can go during heatwaves, where there’s water and it is kept cooler. But you know it’s something we (authorities) are currently not thinking about at all.”

They should be. Last year, a study by Engelbrecht, who was a speaker at the 7th annual Oppenheimer-De Beers Group research conference in Joburg, predicted further warming of between 4 and 6ºC over the subtropics and 3 and 5ºC over the tropics by the end of the century – rising at twice the global rate of temperature increase, under low-mitigation, relative to the present-day climate. And that, he adds, is not factoring in the more frequent and intense heatwaves.

“If we fail to achieve the 1.5ºC (above pre-industrial levels) world, which looks highly likely, and we’re heading very much to a 3ºC world, that translates to 6ºC for us, which is devastating. Current research shows the maize crop can be reduced, if not annihilated, in a 6ºC regional world. There’s no current maize variety that can cope with 6ºC warmer on average.”

Another study by his col- league, atmospheric scientist Dr Rebecca Garland, showed how from 1961 to 1990, Joburg was modelled to have 34.5 days where apparent temperatures were more or equal to 27ºC a year on average.

But between 2011 and 2040, Joburg is projected to have an increase of 35 such days on average a year with the modelling of hot days across the continent indicating that the potential risk to human health from high apparent temperatures is projected to increase.

Last year was already the warmest recorded year spanning the past 100 years – partly because of climate change and the massive El Niño that grew over the Pacific Ocean.

“Last season was something completely unprecedented – the hottest on record for 100 years.

“It should be an eye-opener for us. Our research has been predicting for several years that this type of season will happen more frequently in southern Africa. And now we’ve seen the first one of these. They are just likely to occur at smaller and smaller return periods.

“What we’re going to expect in the next 30 years is going to be unprecedented.

“The last season’s climate stats were something never seen before in southern Africa. Unprecedented heat has arrived.”

But there’s a dearth of infor mation on the impact of heatwaves on human mortality continentally, he explains.

“We just don’t know to what extent we’ll see higher mortality because of heatwaves. That’s a big concern.”