Dhesigen Naidoo
Pretoria - Last week was dramatic. It saw the convergence of the last instalment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the sixth Assessment (AR6) report; the UN Water Summit and South African Human Rights Day 2023.
In all of them, the need for climate resilience in service of reducing the risk and dangers while concomitantly improving people’s quality of life is in sharp focus.
This is as we approach the anniversary of the devastating “rain bomb” of KwaZulu-Natal’s flood events last year.
The IPCC AR6 Synthesis report was launched on March 17, providing a composite picture of Climate Change Risk in the world today, and what we need to do to take advantage of the very narrow window available to avoid the tipping point to a world defined by catastrophe.
The Synthesis Report is clear that on our current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions and development choices, the window is closing on restricting global warming/heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, with the 2-3°C range looking increasingly likely.
A year after the devastation in KZN, southern Africa is being ravaged by Cyclone Freddy, a tropical cyclone that has found enough energy in the atmosphere to persist for a record-breaking five weeks.
In fact, Cyclone Freddy now holds the record as the longest-lasting and highest accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) producing tropical cyclone ever recorded.
Freddy has left a wake of death and destruction in its path.
If Freddy’s successor has a pathway just a little further south, we could have a repeat of the devastation of April 2022 in South Africa.
The African climate disaster map is already characterised by three phenomena. The first is pervasiveness, as we now are experiencing climate-related disasters in all regions in the form of floods, droughts, or wildfires.
The second is the increased intensity of these events, and the third is regularity as previously infrequent events are now almost annual in many parts of the continent.
South Africa has the added conundrum of relatively poor infrastructure due to a lack of maintenance and, in some cases, poor technology choices, increasing our vulnerability to extreme weather events.
Centred around World Water Day, March 22, 2023, the UN held the first Water Summit in a generation. This follows the UN Millennium Summit in 2000 that introduced the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on Water, followed by the UN Declaration of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation in 2010.
The Sustainable Development Summit of 2015 delivered the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), key among them being SDG6, the goal on water and sanitation with the target of universal access to clean water and safe sanitation in line with Agenda 2030 in just seven years from now.
Given the slow progress, UN Water, a coming together of the key multilateral organisations in the UN
system and beyond, together with major stakeholders, launched the Global Acceleration Framework (GAF), and the Decade of Action in 2020. The 2023 Summit engaged in a mid-term review of SDG6, and the global statistics are alarming.
Globally, one in four people, about 2 billion people, were assessed as not having access to safe water on a regular basis. Almost half of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people, does not have safe and clean sanitation to the prescribed standards.
For 44% of households, wastewater is not safely treated.
This is the backdrop to the projection that with our current use rates and development ambitions, the global water demand is expected to increase by 55% by 2050.
South Africa’s own statistics from the StatsSA 2019 surveys indicate a safe water access deficit of 11.8% of the population. The Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) has taken the view that South Africa’s response to the combined Climate Crisis and Development Challenge have to go hand-in-hand.
The articulation of the overarching paradigm – the Just Transition – sets out the vision of an equitable, prosperous climate-resilient society.
The basic premise is that the transition to a low carbon economy must be characterised by justice – procedurally with maximised participation, the largest possible distribution of benefits, and wherever possible to be restorative in redressing the ills of our apartheid legacy.
The PCC completed an analysis of the KZN 2022 flood events to examine both the impact of this climate-related disaster as well as evaluating the disaster response in the emergency phase.
Guided by the president’s call for higher levels of climate adaptation being a core characteristic of the recovery and rebuild phases, the PCC went on to make recommendations on how this may be achieved.
KZN’s slow recovery from the 2022 floods combined with incomplete recovery from the 2019 flood events is cause for concern.
While the efforts of many parties must be applauded during the emergency, the continued water system challenges and the threats related to poor and inadequate wastewater treatment are indicative that the journey to reasonable adaptation and higher resilience to climate disasters has only just begun.
The recommendations include an overhaul of the disaster management system, a call that has now been broadened with the president issuing the instruction to review the Disaster Management Policy, protocols, and system for all disaster categories.
The remarkable effectiveness of the community-based early warning system of the informal settlement in Quarry Road in eThekwini has to be recognised and applauded.
If only this had been replicated throughout eThekwini, the loss of life would have been drastically reduced.
The pervasiveness, intensity, and regularity of climate-related natural disasters in our part of the world dictates that a much higher investment in adaptation, as well as disaster preparedness, is critical to both contain the damage as well as prevent a socio-economic catastrophe.
The City of eThekwini was a global pioneer in the concept of City Climate Response Plans.
It can once again play a pioneering role in Climate Resilient Development on the back of the disastrous floods from a year ago.
* Naidoo is the Presidential Climate Commission head of Climate Resilience and Mitigation, and former CEO of the Water Research Commission.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
Pretoria News