South Africa 2040: It could be hell

If you have children today, they will be at university in 2040. You’ll be in your prime. What will South Africa look like in 21 years time? What world will we live in with our continued carbon emissions?

For South Africa, climate change is a story of water. The country is semi-arid. Rainfall patterns are already changing. The west will keep on getting drier. The east will continue getting wetter. Rain will come in violent spells — hail and downpours lasting a few minutes. Homes will be flooded and vegetation destroyed. We have cemented over natural systems, such as wetlands, which absorb this kind of rainfall, so flash floods will be normal. The rain will also crash into the earth, so it won’t replenish groundwater. Instead it will wash away precious topsoil.

Multiyear droughts will be even more frequent. The government will switch water from farming to people, because dams weren’t built as a result of corruption and nonpayment for water. So there won’t be enough water, even in good years. Thanks to broken sewerage systems, the level of sewage in rivers will be high. Children dying of diarrhoea and cholera will be an hourly reality. People will move to cities in search of clean water.

Rainfall will change so much that subsistence farming will collapse. Food prices will be high and farmers will struggle to produce. When there are droughts, fires or floods in the United States and Russia, imported food will be unaffordable. People will riot for bread.

The cities will be too hot and crowded.

Plans to make more resilient cities, with better public transport and green areas, will be abandoned. Desperate to create jobs, the government will stop controlling air pollution from industry. Factories and dirty vehicles will spit gases into the air, forcing people to wear masks. Where sports do take place, they will be indoors, where the air can be purified.

Renewable energy will be the one thing that does work. But no factories and few jobs would have been created because unions clung to coal jobs. The opportunity to create a new economy will be missed. Energy demand will be down. In summer, on the highveld, it will be too hot to work. Heat waves, with temperatures reaching into the 40s and staying in the 30s at night, will kill the young and the old. That will drive automation, creating mass unemployment.

Pretoria won’t be the capital. The heat and drought will force the government to move to Cape Town. There, thanks to desalination, there will be enough water. But the rest of the province will be a desert. It will be too hot for wine and fruit farming. Warmer oceans will mean the cold fronts that brought winter rainfall will move too far south to bring rain.

A strongman will seize power, promising quick and easy solutions. Xenophobia will be entrenched. The Constitution will be eroded becasue rights won’t be assured and the state will ignore personal freedoms.

People will try to change things, but the natural world will not be able to support more economic activity. It will not be able to support a renewal. Things will just get worse. — Sipho Kings