South Africa is on the brink of a global heating disaster, scientists warn

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

Climatologists have issued dire warnings about the impact of rising global temperatures on southern Africa, which is becoming increasingly hotter and drier.

The report was first published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper on August 15.

Gauteng is increasingly likely to experience a “Day Zero” in the next 10 years – but the taps running dry in the economic heartland is not the only major risk that South Africa faces as the planet’s temperature rises.

A recent assessment by climatologists at the Global Change Institute (GCI) at the University of the Witwatersrand indicates an increasing likelihood that the taps in Gauteng are going to run dry sometime in the 2030s or the 2040s if global heating continues unabated.

But water scarcity is not the only risk. Food security is in danger, with the collapse of the maize and cattle industry brought on by drought, the formation of tropical cyclones in Richards Bay, as experienced in Mozambique, and severe heatwaves that could kill many are also predicted by local climatologists.

All three of the Cape provinces are already caught in the grip of the worst drought in a century, the severity and magnitude of which has deemed it worthy of classification as a national disaster.

The recent IPCC report states, among other things, that droughts will become more frequent at 1.5°C of global warming, and increase proportionately thereafter.

The IPCC has previously identified the 1.5°C global average temperature increase as a tipping point in the climate crisis. It says that, after reaching this tipping point, we can expect “warming of extreme temperatures … frequency, intensity and/or amount of heavy precipitation … and an increase in intensity or frequency of droughts”.