At the bloody battle of Magersfontein on December 11, 1899, Boer forces fighting the British scored a significant victory, firing from their hidden trenches to inflict huge casualties on the enemy – and particularly on the famous Black Watch regiment, which lost more than 300 men.
But, as a new book on environmental change published this week points out, the plains below the Magersfontein hills where the Boers had dug their trenches are now heavily encroached with indigenous acacia umbrella thorn trees. Had this 2nd Anglo-Boer War battle been fought a century later, the Boers would not have been able to pick out the advancing British soldiers and the course of the bitter three-year conflict might have been very different.
Another example of rapid, “modern” environmental change that the book documents has occurred at Marion Island in the Southern Ocean, which has lost most of its ice cap.
In 1966, some 10 percent of the island’s 293-hectares surface was covered with permanent ice and snow; today, just a few isolated patches remain. Researchers estimate that between 1948 and 2009, 42 million cubic metres of ice melted from the ice cap, reducing it in size from 107ha to just 7ha. And recent evidence shows that this remaining cap is losing between 1m and 1.5m of ice from its surface area every year.
The seas around Marion Island have warmed by an average 1.5ºC over the past 40 years.
The new book, Observations on Environmental Change in South Africa, was commissioned by the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON).
The network’s mandate is to establish and maintain state-of-the-art observation monitoring sites and systems on land, sea and in the air, and one of the oldest of its 64 long-term environmental observation projects is in the Jonkershoek valley outside Stellenbosch, which has been operating since the 1930s.
At the launch, the director-general of the Science and Technology department, Dr Phil Mjwara, said the book provided a comprehensive overview of the current understanding of how global change was affecting the South African environment and, by extension, the South African public.
“The consequences of the rapidly changing conditions are already being felt in South Africa, (and) environmental changes are particularly grave for South Africa… As a nation, we are already forced to adapt to environmental change by changing the pattern of our socio-economic behaviour.”
The book is the work of more than 100 contributing authors , and it documents aspects of environmental change in areas as diverse as the atmosphere, freshwater and estuarine systems, rangelands, the coast and the deep seas, and in human endeavours like mining and fishing.
It’s accompanied by a booklet, Combat Change With Change, that translates the science in the book into policy language.
In the introduction, the editorial committee notes that environmental conditions on Earth are changing rapidly and that such changes are progressively affecting South Africa’s future because of the combined impact on human livelihoods, security and prosperity.
“The degree to which these changes are human-induced could be debated, but the fact that changes are taking place is indisputable. As custodians of finite natural resources, we do not have the luxury of being complacent,” they say.
Accurate, long-term scientific measurements of change, as detailed in the book, allow intelligent and responsible policy-making and strategic planning for the future by decision-makers and advisers at all levels, they explain.
“The longer-term impacts of irreversible environmental change will undermine the quality of human livelihoods and may compromise the essential life-support benefits derived from ecosystem services (like clean air and water).
“Environmental change is a global concern and requires ongoing observation, interpretation and responses from the South African government and civil society.” - Cape Argus