As climate impacts intensify, the urgency for effective and equitable climate change adaptation measures grows. Discover how addressing these challenges can protect lives and livelihoods.
Image: Kruger National Park / X
As climate impacts intensify, the need to plan and implement effective and equitable climate change adaptation measures is growing rapidly.
Adapting to current and future impacts arising from human-caused global warming is an enormous and ongoing endeavour. Not only does it require significant financial and other resources, but a deep and wide mindset shift is needed across the state and all sectors of society and economy.
It goes without saying that this work needs to be effective in order to actually protect lives, livelihoods, infrastructure and systems. But it also needs to be equitable.
Because climate change adaptation is inextricably linked to development and the organisation of society and economy, it provides a unique and potent opportunity to reimagine the world's in a more just way.
Simply put, just climate change adaptation can address foundational ills such as poverty inequality and unemployment, whereas adaptation that follows an inequitable, business-as-usual approach will simply entrench and exacerbate these dynamics, which are themselves ultimately unsustainable.
Water and water delivery systems are arguably the most important and urgent factors requiring adaptation interventions.
South Africa is already water scarce and experiencing increasing and cascading water delivery challenges and failures.
When we are designing and prioritising these interventions, we need to account for the fact that it is mostly the poor and vulnerable who experience impacts and failures most strongly.
When things go wrong, such as with the Western Cape’s day zero drought 10 years ago (made three time more intense due to global warming), it is poor communities that receive the short end of the stick when it comes to emergency water provisioning and inequitable enforcement of water rationing.
Similarly, South Africa's food system is deeply unjust.
Retail prices are high in comparison with household income and it is those with little money who suffer malnutrition and stunting.
This is a pre-existing inequality and lack of resilience that will only get worse without equitable adaptation.
Droughts and heatwaves are projected to increase, and rising temperature ranges all combine to threaten maize, wheat, livestock and other forms of food production.
Fossil fuel reliance for fertiliser, industrial agricultural methods and food processing and distribution is another vulnerability. These factors will affect all in the mid-term, but the economically marginalised run the very real risk of food literally becoming unaffordable.
Human settlements are yet further places where pre-existing lack of resilience and inequity starkly manifest.
It is the economically marginalised who live in shacks on unsecured hillsides and the floodplains of rivers, and who had their homes and lives washed away in the climate change aggravated floods of April 2022 in KZN.
Survivors who lost their shacks in the devastation un Umlazi have resorted to rebuilding them in exactly the same locations that nearly saw them lose their lives.
It is in shacks that internal temperatures are between 5 and 7 degrees warmer than outside temperatures.
The Cape Town area saw temperatures of up to 44 degrees for multiple days in a row in recent weeks. It is not surprising that people on the Cape Flats died of heatstroke.
Clean breathable air is our most immediate need.
While climate change doesn't in itself directly threaten this, the main cause of climate change - the burning of fossil fuels - is also the greatest source of deadly air pollution which kills millions of people around the world's annually.
One study shows that pollution from Eskom's coal power plants alone, kills 6 people a day.
These are economically marginalised people who have no choice but to live among the power stations and have to make do with a vastly inadequate public health system to try and address the health effects of the toxic emissions.
Climate change adaptation is so much more than an environmental management issue. Governance, financial, economic and social systems all need to mainstream adaptation into the way they function.
Development needs to centre around a new and dangerous reality in order to prevent loss of lives and ultimately total economic collapse.
If we do this well, and prioritise the urgent needs of those most vulnerable, through no fault of their own, we stand a chance of building a better world that can reverse the destruction of colonialism and centuries old extractive and exploitative mindsets.
If we continue, either knowingly or negligently, to sacrifice those who do not have the means to ensure their own climate resilience, we are going to experience total collapse at some point. Civilisation cannot continue if there are billions who have nothing left anymore.
As the newly appointed chair of the PCC’s Adaptation and Resilience Working Group, I would like to take the opportunity of this tenure to help ensure that equity is woven into the county’s climate adaptation plans and responses.
Additionally, I look forward to encouraging and supporting a deep and well-informed mainstreaming of just adaptation across the state, as well as in collaboration with communities, civil society, the labour movement and the business community.
If we all pull together, in a manner based on science and equity, not only can we protect, but we can help make a better life for all in South Africa.
Brandon Abdinor, PCC Commissioner and Chairperson of its Adaptation and Resilience Working Group.
Image: Supplied.
Brandon Abdinor, PCC Commissioner and Chairperson of its Adaptation and Resilience Working Group.
Follow Business Report on Facebook, X and on LinkedIn for the latest Business and tech news.