By Kevin Bloom Kevin Bloom, senior investigative journalist of Daily Maverick‘s Climate Crisis reporting division “Our Burning Planet”
This article is based on a Climate Risk Report commissioned by Absa Group Citizenship and online independent newspaper Daily Maverick. World-acclaimed scientists at Wits University’s Global Change Institute, with a panel of 12 experts from various disciplines, generated a ‘top five’ list of risks that are almost certain to alter the fabric of our society.
Interlinked onslaughts
In mid-September, around the time that Daily Maverick was signing off on the Climate Risk Report commissioned from the Global Change Institute (CGI) at Wits, National Geographic ran yet another feature under yet another headline that referenced the end-times nature of the planet’s most urgent predicament.
The feature pointed out just how relentlessly the state of Oregon, the once idyllic corner of the US, had been battered in 2020. Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, after a summer of protests over police brutality and racism, Oregon faced a third crisis: wildfire sparked by climate change.
The intersection of crumbling political systems, societal breakdown, a global pandemic and climate collapse had descended to a new nadir by the second half of 2020, and somehow these onslaughts in Oregon seemed interlinked.
World on fire – the transition to a healed world
It was appropriate, then, that the US writer Charles Eisenstein, celebrated for his ability to connect the large dilemmas facing humanity to the more intimate realms of personal agency and psycho-spiritual awareness, should weigh in on the subject. Also in mid-September, Eisenstein published an essay titled World on Fire, wherein he cogently argued that “the transition to a healed world requires something much deeper than better techniques”.
Eisenstein wrote, “I can’t easily draw a causal connection here, but it seems significant that uncontainable wildfires are contemporaneous with inflammatory rhetoric, heated debates, flaring tempers, burning hatred, seething distrust, and smoldering resentment. Just as dried out, fuel-laden forests burned out of control with a mere spark, so also have our cities burned as the spark of police murders touched the ready fuel of generations of racism; decades of economic decay, and months of Covid confinement.”
Climate change does not happen in a vacuum
The globally recognised team of environmental scientists at the Global Change Institute (GCI) in Johannesburg, were acutely aware that they could not use such language and imagery in their own assessment of the crisis.
That didn’t change the fact that there were some remarkable similarities between Eisenstein’s essay and the conclusions of the scientists, within the tight strictures of their disciplines.
“Climate change does not happen in a vacuum,” the GCI Climate Risk Report warns in its introductory passages, stating that the crisis acts as a “threat multiplier” by widening a society’s pre-existing systemic and structural cracks.
In Southern Africa, where endemic poverty and unemployment drives competition and access to basic resources, the rates of rural-urban migration are perennially rising. The United Nations estimates that 77% of South Africans are expected to live in cities by 2050, a 13% rise against current statistics.
But, as the GCI Report observes, not only do these estimates discount the “plausibility” that climate change will accelerate the trend, they also ignore the fact that many migrants are unwitting victims of the crisis. So-called “climate refugees” are already with us, even if that’s not how the migrants view their reasons for moving, which invariably involve many factors.
Five groups of interrelated climate risks
And so, the points of vulnerability to climate change in southern Africa, have led the GCI researchers to identify the “top risks” in their Report as clusters of related issues.
The list has been collectively scored by 12 experts from various disciplines – both in terms of the likelihood that the risks will materialise, and the consequences if they do. After the first round of scoring, the 12 most urgent threats were identified, and these were then rescored by the experts and clustered into five groups of interrelated climate risks, highlighted in this article.
Risk 1: Food insecurity and the viability of the agricultural sector
Topping the list, perhaps unsurprisingly, is food insecurity and the viability of the agricultural sector.
“At least 5.6 million southern Africans are undernourished, without even considering the impact of Covid-19… This number is set to almost double by 2030 if we don’t change our ways.”
They have been identified as a pair of related risks, with the likelihood of food insecurity deemed as “expected” in the medium term and the consequences for South Africa and the broader region scored as “severe to catastrophic”. The likelihood of failures in the agricultural sector, by contrast, have been deemed “frequent to expected” and the consequences “severe”.
While the first looks at “inadequate household and community nutrition due to local, regional or global failures in crop and livestock production”, the second is concerned with the “non-viability of regionally important agriculture-based activities, both subsistence and commercial”. Both are subject to the increasing prevalence of “hot, empty skies” – or, more specifically, the fact that “everyday life for South Africans… has translated to more intense heat waves and more extremely hot days in the past decade than ever before”.
Consequently, if there is one overriding factor that’s inherent to this dual risk, it can be summarised in the following paragraph: “At least 5.6 million southern Africans are undernourished, without even considering the impact of Covid-19… This number includes the effects of an inherently marginal and varying climate, the climate change experienced already, land degradation, governance failures and other socio-economic malfunctions. This number is set to almost double by 2030 if we don’t change our ways.”
With rainfall expected to “decline and become more variable”, and “temperatures in Southern Africa to increase at double the global rate”, the country’s “once-suitable regions for farming will shift or even disappear”. Less local food supply will translate into higher prices, which will translate into South Africa needing to import way more food than it does at present, assuming that food is readily available from the country’s trade partners.
“In the case of global food shortages,” the Report explains, “which seem likely, entities prioritise their own needs over trade.”
From the impact of extreme climate events such as flood and drought on food stability, to food accessibility, to the nutritional value of food, the “solutions towards zero hunger” are as obvious as they run counter to the current distribution models.
Small-scale farming ranks highly in the GCI’s list of solutions, as does investment in affordable and adaptive agriculture and the minimisation of waste. But without rainfall and sufficient irrigation and crop yields – even if the necessary movement is made from maize to more heat-resistant breeds – food shortages are a certainty. Which brings us to the second of the top five climate risks: “Shortages of clean water.”
