With more climate crises coming, SA needs a better response plan

My memory of flooding in KwaZulu-Natal on the scale of the tragedy we have witnessed over the past week in Durban was in the spring of 1987. I was seven, and on the first day of the floods it took me some time to understand the scale of the devastation we were witnessing, beyond the giddy excitement of learning that our parents would be collecting us from school barely two hours after our arrival.

Information travelled more slowly in those days. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to be hugely concerned about the rainfall, until reports that the Umgeni River bridge was about to be washed away necessitated a wave of school closures in Durban North.

By the time my mother made the terrifying drive back over the bridge to collect me, the water had reached the level of the road, and broken trees were knocking against the Umgeni Bridge.

The bridge was closed by the time we embarked on the 35km drive back to Umlazi. As we took the winding route through Springfield Park and Sydenham, past submerged buses and cars, and flooded homes, I remember my excitement fading as the extent of the catastrophe became clearer.

I called my mother to ask her if I had embellished the memory — she confirmed every detail. We were so much luckier than the tens of thousands who lost loved ones, suffered horrifying injuries and lost everything they owned.

I recount this memory because this is how we used to talk about and remember ecological disasters: as rare or unique. But as climate change intensifies, disaster becomes ever more a part of our seasonal experience. Over just the past five years we can point to two additional disasters: the KwaZulu-Natal mudslides in 2019, and the Western Cape drought and water crisis of 2017 and 2018.

As SA — the world’s 14th largest carbon emitter — embarks on a bid to spearhead a just transition from a carbon-dependent economy, the reality remains that halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 are global goals, requiring unprecedented levels of prolonged multilateral collaboration.

We also know that the myopic, nationalist politics of convenience, greed, and short-termism in some of the world’s largest emitting countries — I’m looking at you, Donald Trump — have often stymied our efforts at collaborating in this way for the global good. Which means SA needs a more robust system — with accompanying financing — for more regular disaster management.

“Mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery”: this is the mantra of disaster-management institutions, specialists and humanitarian organisations the world over. Yet time and again we find ourselves wrong-footed in SA as we scramble for the resources, expertise and manpower to mount an impactful response.

In a statement on its relief plans for municipalities around KwaZulu-Natal this week, the provincial department of human settlements announced a laundry list of budgetary reallocations to plug a R1bn funding gap in resources to attend to flood damage. These include diversions from the Urban Settlement

Development Grant, the Informal Settlements Upgrading Grant and the Residential Rent Relief Grant. Each diversion represents an opportunity cost in the tens or hundreds of millions of rands for these institutions, which will be further set back by a lack of adequate financial planning for disaster relief.

But the responsibility for mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery does not only fall on the shoulders of the state.

The Solidarity Fund — created in March 2020 to fund a rapid response to the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic — is preparing to wind down by September 2022, and we should be asking ourselves what we can learn in policy terms about the intersection of public, private and non-profit organisations as rapid response agents in times of national and regional disaster in our country.

The fund was an unprecedented mobilisation of leadership, resources and co-ordinating capacity to respond to a global health catastrophe.

Over the past week we have observed the tireless work of organisations such as Gift of the Givers and the Church Alliance for Social Transformation in response to the floods. We have also heard warnings from others, such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, about the risk of government flood relief funding being misappropriated by a ruthlessly corrupt and politically connected mafia in the province — as was the case with the Covid-19 personal protective equipment corruption scandals in 2020 and 2021.

The time has come for our country to marshal a whole-society plan for the crisis response and recovery of our communities after ecological catastrophes. By adopting a collaborative model that incorporates clean financing, effective resource mobilisation and humanitarian expertise, we can be better prepared to save lives when disaster strikes, as well as provide support and restore dignity to communities ravaged by the effects of climate change.