sabc-plus-logo

Home | 

‘Government needs to distinguish between adaptation and mitigation in dealing with devastating floods’

  • A person walks around a damaged bridge caused by flooding in Umlazi near Durban, South Africa, April 16, 2022.
  • Image Credits :
  • Floods-kzn-R-750x375
Reading Time: 4 minutes

The director of the Global Change Institute at Wits University professor Francois Engelbrecht says government needs to distinguish the difference between adaptation and mitigation in dealing with devastating floods such as the ones that recently occurred in KwaZulu-Natal.

Studies have shown that climate change made the floods deadly. Human-induced climate change has doubled the probability of such disasters.

The floods killed more than 400 people, displaced more than 40 000 others and destroyed more than 4000 houses.

Professor Engelbrecht says adaption is an admission of vulnerability.

“In the case of the KwaZulu-Natal floods, remember that we’ve been experiencing these events for as long as people have been living in the Durban area. Very, very similar floods occurred in 1856, 1987, 2019 and then again in April this year. So, there is evidence that climate change has now has in fact doubled the likelihood of these types of floods to occur in the Durban area.”

The role of climate change in natural disasters like the floods in KZN: 22 April 2022

Experts urge government to take multi-disciplinary approach to mitigate climate change impacts

A group of experts from various fields are calling on government to take a multi-disciplinary approach to mitigate the impact of climate change.

The appeal was sounded during a webinar by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, looking at the impact of the floods on urbanisation and the vulnerability of communities.

It destroyed businesses, roads and homes. Thousands have been displaced.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal has now started a discussion around this, bringing together researchers, NGOs, affected people, and climate specialists.

Bobby Peek, Director of Groundwork, a non-profit environmental justice organisation based in Durban, has highlighted the plight of vulnerable communities who have lost their homes, calling for housing units that are more resilient.

He says, “We need a short-term plan to tackle hotspots, but we needed 10 to 30-year plan to re-engineer the city. We need to build a resilient city. We need independent expertise to come in at to look at this again. So, how do we develop a new city, a resilient city and we need to recognise that the settlement patterns in Durban are wrong for our townships and fancy Ballito apartments are built in the wrong places. So, we need to rethink our settlements in Durban.”

Global warming made SA floods more likely: Study

Global warming made the heavy rains behind South Africa’s devastating floods last month twice as likely as they would have been if greenhouse gas emissions had never heated the planet, scientists said on Friday.

R10 billion of damage was caused to roads, power lines, water pipes and one of Africa’s busiest ports.

The World Weather Attribution group analysed weather data and digital simulations to compare today’s climate with that before the industrial revolution in the late 1800s, when the world was more than two degrees Fahrenheit cooler.

A report of that study said such an extreme rainfall episode would be expected to happen about once every 40 years without human-caused global warming.

That’s now reduced, it said, to about once every 20 years.

Attributing specific weather events to climate change is a tricky business that deals in probabilities and not certainty.

However, co-author Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, said the study had examined data from the wider region, not just Durban.

Africa’s southeastern coast is on the front line of seaborne weather systems that, scientists says, climate change is intensifying.

South Africa’s northern neighbour Mozambique has suffered multiple cyclones and floods in the past decade, including one in April that killed more than 50 people.

A discussion on Mozambique suffering from a string of devastating tropical cyclones: 12 March 2022

Author

MOST READ