The build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere will produce alarming climate changes in South Africa in the next 50 years, causing massive die-offs of plant species, rising temperatures, increases in fires and lower rainfalls.
These are among the predictions given in the first South African report outlining the effects of climate change on the country's plant diversity.
The report, funded by the South African branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), says the climate in the country in the next 50 years will be "unlike anything experienced today".
It predicts:
A decrease in summer rainfall of 5 percent in the northern regions and 25 percent in the eastern and southern Cape;
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A rise of up to 3°C in temperatures over the country;
The Karoo will become so arid that only the hardiest plants will survive;
The fynbos biome will shrink;
The Western Cape will lose a significant portion of its winter rainfall; and
The future of agriculture will be uncertain.
The report was produced by William Bond of the University of Cape Town and Guy Midgely and Mike Rutherford of the National Botanical Institute.
The effects of a drier climate on the Karoo, which has the greatest variety of succulent flora in the world, would be "devastating", the report says.
On a coloured map illustrating the distribution of biomes, or vegetation regions, predicted for 2050, white space occupies about half of South Africa.
Other than describing these areas as being drier and supporting fewer plant species, the scientists could not say what type of vegetation would cover them.
"Adult plant species will survive there for a period, but the seeds won't grow," Midgely said. "It represents a bunch of plants that will be the living dead."
Midgely predicted "a huge loss in species" in the fynbos biome, which would contract until it was restricted to the mountains.
Bond said he had once been sceptical about predictions of global climate change, but now regarded them as "alarming and scary".
"I became so worried I felt we could not publish the results in journals read only by scientists - we had to make the results available to a wider public," he said. "It's a problem that needs to be shared by all South Africans."
In the past two summers in the Western Cape, there had been extreme droughts that had produced a remarkable die-back of some plant species.
"Some animals suffered as well," Bond said. "The geometric tortoise showed alarming collapse. These droughts gave us a taste of things to come."
The report says computer models show climate will not change uniformly across the globe.
In western Europe and parts of the United States, global warming could benefit agriculture, which is limited by cold winter temperatures. It is these countries that produce the most greenhouse gases. The US alone accounts for 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
The concentration of carbon dioxide has risen by more than 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution, which dramatically increased the burning of fossil fuels, and the Arctic icecap has thinned by 40 percent since the 1950s.
Ian Macdonald, head of WWF in South Africa, said that climate change was "a more dangerous and insidious threat" to the world than terrorism.
"Yet politicians have not even got climate change on their radar screens, let alone at the top of their lists," Macdonald said.
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