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EVERY time I see a report on regions running dry on water issues I see someone pop up, saying: “This is attributable to poor management in municipalities”.
Yep. A lot of the immediate issues probably are; a lot of water has gone to waste as a result; but let’s not ignore the fact that the whole of southern Africa is in the grip of a drought. And let’s not ignore the one underlying cause of that which we can influence, either.
“Poultry and red meat producers in Southern Africa are bracing for a steep rise in feed costs after drought conditions affected South Africa, the biggest grain producer in the region.”
“Some 16 percent of [Zimbabwe’s] population are expected to be 'food insecure' at the peak of the 2015-16 lean season […] a 164 percent increase on the previous year, the WFP said.”
“As the 2015-16 agriculture season draws nearer, there is a 90 percent chance that an El Niño will develop during the October to December period. Historically, El Niño conditions are associated with below-average and erratic rainfall in the southeastern parts of the region...”
Aaargh.
Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere has been setting records – 42 degrees in Washington State, and, according to a science journalist I know, 40 degrees in Munich! (Egad, what is it going to be like in our summer?)
More than 60 people dead in Egypt as the heatwave sears the country - and in the States, “… the smoke was often so dense, it blocked the blue light spectrum entirely, washing everything in a pale, flat yellow, a creepy, apocalyptic tint that contrasted well with the redness in your eyes and the gray dryness of your throat.”
Fire. Huge wildfires engulfing unthinkably large areas of forest in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California. What Professor Bob Scholes at the University of the Witwatersrand calls “mega-fire days, when nothing you throw at a fire can stop it”.
Scholes, a leading author in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has researched climate change impacts for 25 years and will present a paper on ‘Climate Change: a risk to forests’ at the 14th World Congress on Forestry Research Symposium, a pre-event for the main congress, to be held in Durban at the International Convention Centre from 7-11 September.
We’ve seen mega-fires here too, quite recently. Do you remember 2007, when fires raged in Mpumalanga? I was there at the time, staying in a resort, seeing that haze in the sky and smelling the smoke.
What I didn’t realise was that the fires had crossed the border and that this fire, fanned by high winds in a very dry season, was busy pretty much wiping out swathes of the forestry industry in Swaziland.
Forestry is a long-cycle industry (ten years for the ‘crop’ to grow, 50 years at least for the infrastructure) so this is a severe blow.
But it’s not the only threat climate change poses to the industry, as Scholes points out in his paper – there are other things, such as the changing habits of pests (some insect populations across the world are exploding in warmer weather) and shifts in precipitation – forest plantations are reliant on rain, quite a lot of it. And trees can’t walk away from a drought…
Forestry is about 1.2% of our GDP (which doesn’t seem like much until you realise that the whole of our agriculture is only about 3%), but it provides jobs in areas where jobs are few: “The industry employs approximately 165 000 people, of which 92 700 jobs are attributed to the forestry sector in particular, the sawmilling, mining timber, pulp and paper and other related industries accounting for the remaining 72 300 jobs,” according to last year’s FP&M Seta report.
Most of these jobs are in rural Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal. Other plantations are spread across the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and the Western Cape.
So that’s just one snapshot of possible economic and social consequences of climate change.
And by the way, I don’t think there’s much room for doubt that a major cause of all of this IS climate change. Yes, we have natural cycles between drought and wetter periods; but a lot of science sees climate change driving us to tougher conditions – there’s “evidence for a doubling in the occurrences [of El Niño, our dry nemesis] in the future in response to greenhouse warming”, for example (Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming, Wenju Cai et al, Nature, January 2014).
Plight of the peacock spider
Science like this crosses my desk almost daily, but those who want to see it all as a conspiracy by thousands and thousands of scientists will not be moved by that. Me, I’m going with the farming and forestry communities, who have been matter-of-factly planning for climate change for ages – and with the Pentagon, which calls it an “urgent and growing threat” (Washington Times, July 29 2015) and says it increases “the strain on fragile states and vulnerable population by dampening economic activity”.
Exactly. Time to urge our government and others to get radical about our approach to mitigating climate change – to prevent job losses in agriculture, deepening food insecurity and more worldwide migration even if you don’t give a damn about the wonderful creatures (like these peacock spiders), one in six of whom are at risk of extinction as a result.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
