Cape Town - Imagine a summer hotter than any you have experienced in South Africa, and waking up in the morning to no shower because you have used your monthly quota of water.
Imagine dealing with your sewage in that heat when you have no water left to flush the toilet. Can you dig a pit loo?
This is a scenario sketched by UCT climate scientist Bruce Hewitson to show how climate change could affect our everyday lives if we do not take action quickly to reduce greenhouse gases and to adapt to the effects of unavoidable climate change.
Hewitson was among a group of top South African climate scientists who contributed to the UN’s Fifth Assessment report on climate change and briefed the media on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s report.
The report, released in Japan on Monday, shows that the world is, in many cases, ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate, which is already affecting agriculture, human health, water supplies and ecosystems, from the tropics to the poles.
It sketches “climate resilient pathways” society can take to adapt to a hotter world.
Hewitson said if South Africa took no action to adapt, “the future is bleak”. What needed to change was policy, but how to do so was not easy.
“I would like to invite every South African minister to dinner and say: ‘Give me three hours of your time’.”
The IPCC report, titled “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, drew on the work of thousands of scientists over the past six years and is intended as a tool for policymakers.
Bob Scholes, systems ecologist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), said there was a need for early and aggressive action on climate change, rather than talk.
“We like to think we’re a smart species… plants and animals are not having a debate about climate change. They’re voting with their feet and migrating to the poles.
“The problem is they can’t do it fast enough, because human climate change is many, many times faster than climate change in the past,” Scholes said.
This meant there was a massively increased risk of the extinction of tens of thousands of species.
“There is no sudden point where the wheels fall off; it just gets worse and worse as we go on.”
A key step for South Africa was to start decarbonising our economy.
“This is not just a feel-good issue. Very soon we will be in a world which will punish carbon economies,” Scholes said.
The country could generate 15 percent of electricity without fossil fuel almost immediately and by 2050 by using just “a fraction” of the coal we use today.
Debra Roberts, who heads the environmental planning and climate protection department at eThekwini municipality, said cities were at particular risk of climate change impacts, but had unique opportunities to tackle them.
There was a need for an overhaul in the way cities were planned and designed.
“The problem is that local government has no official mandate to act (on climate change) and no funds.” - Cape Times