Sunday, October 18, 2009

Looking at Climate Change.....and experiencing some of it in Cape Town

The first half of this week required a visit to Cape Town to attend a workshop on Climate Change hosted by the Climate Change Action Partnership (CAP), a partnership of 8 of the most prominent environmental NGO's in South Africa, including the Endangered Wildlife Trust. The workshop was held at the headquarters of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain in the grounds of the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Unfortunately, the programme didn't really allow much time to walk and explore this very picturesque setting!



If you have not been involved in any of the discussions on Climate Change before, it is quite a bewildering experience at first. Consistent with modern trends, this field of environmental study is wrought with what I call 'Acronymania" and the first few hours of presentations by learned colleagues were brim-full of a whole new range of acronyms which I've never heard of before. Examples of which are NCCCF, REDD, REDD+, SACCN, UNFCCC, PPRI, SANAS, NSSA, etc, etc. No wonder most people don't quite understand the very real impacts of global climate change and humanity's role in it! I think that one of the major challenges here is to clarify the message with regard to the causes, impact and changes brought about by this phenomenon for public consumption.

Fortunately, things improved during the first day when several projects focused on mitigating against climate change impacts across southern Africa provided feedback on the valuable work they were involved in. The most impressive presentation by far was by Ailsa Holloway from UCT who reviewed the major climatic events to affect the south-western Cape over the last 20 years and the extent and monetary losses suffered because of each. She made a very important point in saying that man needs to learn from the impacts of these events and adapt and plan the way we are doing things much better to reduce the risk of future losses and damage to infrastructure and even lives. The trend so far has been to replace and repair infrastructure as soon as possible after an event, but in exactly the same place it was before , just placing it in the path of the next flood, landslide, etc! Not great adaptive thinking and possibly also the recipe for even greater losses in future. This also means that people cannot just settle and build houses wherever they see fit. The regular flooding and washing away of housing establishments in up-market developments as well as informal housing in several areas of South Africa over the last few years also confirms the fact that people still do not realise the very real threats posed by the manner and rate of development and urbanisation that is currently prevalent in most large urban areas of the country.

Despite initial misgivings, it was certainly an informative workshop and there are quite a few options to include a climate change focus into the projects that I am involved in, especially with regard to migratory raptors and species frequenting habitats that are expected to be most adversely affected by this phenomenon.

There certainly was enough weather packed into the three-day visit to back-up the fact that we are living in interesting times as far as climate is concerned. From the turbulent flight down to Cape Town, wind and rain on day 1, a beautiful sunny day on day 2, low mist on the West Coast and gale-force winds by the time I left on Wednesday evening, the Cape certainly put everything on display, No wonder the weather's the most spoken about topic in that part of the world!

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