By Blessing Manale
While climate change impacts are visible in all sectors, the negative impacts in the built environment, agriculture and water sectors have stood out prominently as the theatres of many climate-change related disasters including floods, prolonged droughts and wildfires among other impacts.
In the past three years, South Africa has faced increasingly severe and more frequent climate disasters, often simultaneously across the country. We have had wildfires in the Western Cape, heat waves in the Northern Cape, continuing drought conditions in the Eastern Cape and high-energy storms in Gauteng.
The exponential rise in built infrastructure has resulted in significant material usage and adverse environmental consequences, particularly in the context of climate change. Surprisingly, more than one-third of global energy consumption and carbon emissions can be attributed to the construction and operation of residential and commercial structures.
The built environment remains critical in day-to-day activities of society due to urbanisation and rapid increase of the basic needs of society on built environment for infrastructures such as water, transportation, electricity, energy, telecommunication, health and wastewater management.
To effectively mitigate climate change, it is crucial to examine buildings across their entire life cycle, considering not only their operational energy consumption and associated carbon emissions but also the embodied aspect.
It is also clear that inadequate or delayed adaptation interventions will increase the risks to water security, food security, health security, as well as overall socio-economic risk. Alarming signals from the Insurance Industry relating to the escalating costs of disaster risk finance, and even talk of the prospect of highly vulnerable regions eventually becoming uninsurable in the wake of climate change, is increasingly concerning.
Investment needs water, agriculture and the built environment adaptation
These impacts manifest across a water value chain that supports food security and income generation, agricultural productivity, and energy generation, and human dignity and health - all critical levers for socio-economic development, poverty alleviation and employment and livelihoods.
Inequalities in water and sanitation access across the water value chain, coupled with unmaintained infrastructure and avoidable water losses, leave economic centres and cities unprepared for extreme climate events such as a prolonged drought, while communities living in peri-urban or informal settlements are disproportionately impacted by floods. Incremental rises in temperature and changes in rainfall variability exacerbate water scarcity; those hoarding water have a much greater advantage than those that do not have enough.
As a direct response to climate disasters and in recognition of the increasing vulnerability of South Africa to climate risks, the President, in the February 2024 State of the Nation Address announced the establishment of Climate Change Response Fund to bring together all spheres of government and the private sector in a collaborative effort to build our resilience and respond to the impacts of climate change
This fund may deploy several instruments, including grants for loss and damage as well as recovery: leveraging public and private investments in priority sectors such as food security, water security and infrastructure and other innovative financial instruments and modalities.
Combining public finance, private investment, funding partnerships with multilateral partners and bilateral partners will optimise the available resources and take adaptation financing to the required scale.
Regional opportunities and implications
The impacts of climate change are felt across the region and a continent widely considered to be the most impacted by climate change. Its leaders need to be more responsive than is currently the case, and should take the lead in local, regional and global climate initiatives.
South Africa has a significant regional water footprint and relies heavily on regional water resources that largely come from other countries and/or shared river basins and aquifers (shared ecosystems). South Africa’s water uses and ecosystem practices also impact shared ecosystems and neighbouring countries.
Ensuring the right investments to ensure a higher level of disaster risk reduction can rejuvenate efforts to create local partnerships across social partners and organise for South Africa to be a more active in mobilising resources from the developed world, build capacity and technical assistance to achieve a higher level of resilience for South Africa, the Southern African region and Africa as a whole.
Finally, the prioritisation of the water value chain can be explained by its intrinsic value to all aspects of South Africa’s economy and society – increasingly impacted by climate change across sectors, the economy, and society through increasing temperatures, seasonal rainfall variability and droughts and floods.
It is these findings and trends have behoved the Presidential Climate Commission to undertake research on adaptation readiness in the three key economic focus areas of the water, the agriculture, and the built environment address what needs to be put in place to accelerate adaptation readiness, and to agree transformative climate resilient development pathways.
Blessing Manale is the Head, Communications and Outreach at the Presidential Climate Commission.
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