SA has a plan to beat the planet’s heat
We are on a trajectory that will soon see humanity eclipse the 1.5°C threshold that defines so-called ‘dangerous climate change’. So what is to be done and how is SA preparing to navigate a hotter world?
Climate change mitigation is defined as “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases (GHGs)”. While much of the world devotes considerable attention towards mitigation efforts and strategies, even the most optimistic scenarios and projections see the planet hurtling towards and beyond the thresholds that define “dangerous climate change”.
What then is to be done when the global average temperature is increasingly likely to eclipse the 1.5°C of global warming that scientists have concluded will set off various irreversible climatic phenomena that affect the generations that will follow us?
How does South Africa prepare for a future where surface water resources are ever more scarce and rainfall patters are unpredictable? How do coastal regions prepare for the increased coastal storms and inevitable sea-level rise? How does South Africa prepare for a future where crops and livestock are threatened by soaring temperatures, opening the door to starvation and unrest? In a word: adaptation.
Professor Coleen Vogel, climatologist and adaptation and sustainability specialist at the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, told that adaptation was “...what people are trying to do to enable society and the environment to better respond when a major climate risk occurs”.
South Africa’s most recent draft Climate Change Bill defines adaptive capacity as the “ability of systems, institutions, humans and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to consequences”.
Vogel explained that the essence of an adaptation strategy was to increase this adaptive capacity.
“We’ve got to try to build that capacity as soon as possible.”
She said we had to understand that South Africa’s adaptation plans operated on a number of different scales. “Adaptation is very context-relevant.” Tsunamis are not expected in Johannesburg, for example.
“So each plan is adapted to its people and to its environment,” said Vogel. “The thing that we can say about South Africa is that we need to really be clipping our development strategy much much more closely to our adaptation strategy.”
As an example, she said: “If we are designing new settlements, we should be designing those with an eye to climate change, so do not develop them in riverbank areas or in wetland areas.”
Internationally, South Africa’s adaptation work “is exemplary. In fact, we have some of the best adaptation planning and I emphasise the word ‘planning’. So we’ve got a lot of ideas but putting them into practice is another story.”
South Africa’s National Climate Change
Adaptation Strategy (NCCAS) is one such plan. It is an attempt to provide a “common vision” of climate change adaptation and climate resilience for the country and outlines priority areas for achieving this vision.
The NCCAS is a national strategy and accordingly does not prescribe in detail how adaptation will or should take place in the many sectors affected by climate change.
The National Climate Change Response Policy catalogues water, agriculture, health, human settlements, biodiversity and ecosystems, and disaster risk reduction as priority adaptation-related sectors. The NCCAS goes further and identifies transportation and infrastructure, energy, mining, oceans and coast as additional priority sectors.
The NCCAS has four strategic objectives:
● Build climate resilience and adaptive capacity to respond to climate change risk and vulnerability;
● Promote the integration of climate change adaptation response into development objectives, policy, planning and implementation;
● Improve understanding of climate change impacts and capacity to respond to these impacts; and
● Ensure resources and systems are in place to enable implementation of climate change responses.
It also has nine strategic interventions:
● Reduce human, economic, environmental, physical and ecological infrastructure vulnerability and build adaptive capacity;
● Develop a co-ordinated Climate Services system that provides climate products and services for key climate-vulnerable sectors and geographic areas;
● Develop a vulnerability and resilience methodology framework that integrates biophysical and socio-economic aspects of vulnerability and resilience;
● Facilitate mainstreaming of adaptation responses into sectoral planning and implementation;
● Promote research application, technology development, transfer and adoption to support planning and implementation;
● Build the necessary capacity and awareness for climate change responses;
● Establish effective governance and legislative processes to integrate climate change in development planning;
● Enable substantial flows of climate change adaptation finance; and
● Develop and implement a monitoring and evaluation system that tracks the implementation of adaptation actions and their effectiveness.
Africa has been hit hard by climate change and there is a need for massive investment in adaptation
— for instance, decarbonisation of the grid with renewable
energy
Minister of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries Barbary Creecy explained in 2020 that “this Strategy defines the country’s vulnerabilities, plans to reduce those vulnerabilities and leverage opportunities, outlines the required resources for such action, whilst demonstrating progress on climate change adaptation”.
“Adaptation to climate change presents South Africa with an opportunity to transform the health of the economy and build resilience, thus strengthening the social and spatial fabric, and enables the country to remain globally competitive,” said Creecy.
A report by the World Bank, Africa’s Pulse: Climate Change Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa Can Improve Resilience and Deliver Jobs, states that “urban policies that are climate-sensitive can help local governments leverage their limited public finance with private sector investment while addressing problems such as pollution, floods, extreme heat and energy access”.
“South Africa will need $215-billion in investment in its cities,” the report says, noting that these investments would “deliver benefits” of $700-billion, or just over R10-trillion. They will also result in an average of 120,000 net new jobs by 2050.
“Africa has been hit hard by climate change and there is a need for massive investment in adaptation — for instance, decarbonisation of the grid with renewable energy, nature-based urban infrastructure, scale-up of climate-smart agriculture and modernisation of food systems, among others.”