‘Municipalities must accept some blame’

A SENIOR forecaster at the South African Weather Service says South Africa needs to learn how to deal with severe weather events from other countries.

Puseletso Mofokeng, a senior forecaster at the South African Weather Service, said the island of Reunion, which is prone to tropical cyclones, was a good example of how to implement storm systems that prevent large-scale loss of life and damage to infrastructure.

“We can learn from them by taking over our engineers and geologists to find out how they have managed to keep their island as good as it is.

He was speaking during a Government Communication and Information System webinar on the impact of climate change on society.

Devastating floods in KwaZulu-Natal last month led to the loss of more than 400 lives and to severe damage to public infrastructure, homes and businesses.

“The issue is the imbalance of how we live and this is down to social status. As we build houses, we needed to be guided in terms of the standard in how we build those houses. We need to identify areas that are suitable for human settlement and we can minimise the impact of future storms,” he said.

Mofokeng said the extreme nature of the disaster and the number of lives lost could be attributed to KZN being the province with the fastest growth in the country.

“People are competing for spaces and some of these are not suitable for human settlement.

“The southern parts of KZN, including eThekwini, are susceptible to extreme rainfall where we have flooding… 20km off the coast you have the warm Aghulas current and when you have low pressure off this current, it draws the moisture into KZN and the Eastern Cape.

“The scale of impact in terms of flooding in those two provinces is high,” he said.

Speaking on the impact of extreme weather events, South African Local Government’s senior adviser on climate change Slindile Maphumulo said local government needed to take some of the blame for allowing people to continue living in informal settlements on wetlands or on flood plains and for not factoring in climate resilient infrastructure.

“There is not much that the government does to prevent this. They encourage people to live in these areas by providing basic services. They are not doing enough because climate change shows that events similar to KZN are going to reoccur. We continue as if we are not in a crisis,” she said.

Maphumulo said most municipalities were not climate responsive and focused on infrastructure that was not necessarily mitigating climate impacts. “Municipalities must invest in resilient infrastructure that will be able to withstand future climate risks.”