Dhesigen Naidoo
South Africa has been hit hard by climate change. The projected tipping points, as modelled by scientists, are coming closer to reality – rapidly.
The Wits Global Change Institute pegs three alarming tipping points – conditional on our business-as-usual responses to date. The first is a water crisis – the real possibility of a Gauteng Day Zero. This is a combination of many factors.
Climate Change – both through altering the local weather patterns with higher temperatures and extreme weather events. This compounds already low maintenance levels of infrastructure, leaving us with a leaking bucket.
If this is not bad enough, the administration is not billing and successfully collecting revenue, with this unaccounted-for-water reaching close to 50% in Johannesburg, with Tshwane and Ekurhuleni not far behind, leaving behind a budget deficit preventing paying for capacity, maintenance of the water system, and badly needed new infrastructure.
Another related and potentially overwhelming tipping point associated with a higher than +1.5 degrees increase, is the loss of staple crops and a significant part of the national livestock asset. This is a direct threat to food security.
It also threatens the very significant proportion of folk who work on farms and the many more who work in the agro-processing and retail value chains.
The direct cost will not only be related to the loss of GDP from parts of the agricultural sector, but also the extra costs associated with the need to spend even more on food imports.
The third is the frequency of cyclones on the East Coast of South Africa, storm events with high energy on the back of higher atmospheric temperatures to be able to travel further inland.
This increases the likelihood of replicating in South Africa the devastation like Cyclone Freddy, that left a trail of unbelievable destruction in Malawi or Cyclone Idai in Mozambique.
It is clear that if we don’t make the appropriate investments in developing higher climate resilience and radically improving our adaptation status, we will be heading for serious trouble.
At the same time, in addition to losses and incredible damage, we will have to direct more and more funds to disaster management, recovery, and rebuilding.
The choice is whether to invest now in climate adaptation action toward improving our chances to better manage the devastating impacts of climate change, or use even more funds in a loss and damage paradigm.
In his 2024 SONA address, President Ramaphosa addressed this need directly and announced that ‘ …we have decided to establish a Climate Change Response Fund. This will 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”.
A team of National Treasury, Department of Forestry, Fishers and the Environment (DFFE) led by the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), coordinated a process to accelerate the realization of this critical pillar.
The process had the benefit of highly participative consultative stakeholder engagements and the generous input of experts from many disciplines, which enabled the PCC to table a proposal at its December meeting.
Innovation is key in a tight fiscal environment with low growth prospects and a volatile investment risk environment. The basic tenets of the Climate Change Response Fund (CCRF) are as follows:
Firstly, it must, through its investment philosophy and actions, advance the notions of climate justice and equity. Higher climate resilience must empower further community development, reduce poverty, and help close the inequality gap.
The Climate Change Act leads a suite of policy and strategy tools to effect climate action. The crux, as always, is implementation.
Effective and high impact implementation of climate adaptation and resilience needs a quartet of factors acting in concert and a public understanding of the climate change web of science , human capacity and capability, and finance.
The CCRF, while primarily a finance mechanism, seeks to empower and stimulate the other three parts of the quartet. Key is the recognition that we first have to create a high trust environment to enable funding participation of the private sector at all levels – business, the pension funds, cooperatives and stokvels and other players in civil society.
The CCRF must become a hallmark example of a new positive, participatory and sustainable tool that redefines the South African fiscal environment.
It should be established on the back of an initial re-risking investment from the government, and rapid participation of other sectors investing in climate resilience to prevent future sunk costs associated with disaster management, and critical climate adaptation measures, including infrastructure development in multiple sectors.
In addition, South Africa’s future competitiveness and global trade ambitions depends intimately on Green Industrialization.
We have the opportunity of a superb start to catalyse a fundamental shift in the structure of the South African economy. The CCRF can catalyse a pathway to a climate resilient, equitable, prosperous society. This is the South Africa we want.
This is the South Africa we deserve.
Dhesigen Naidoo is the executive for adaptation and resilience at the Presidential Climate Commission.
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