The lush vineyards, rare plant species and breathtaking scenery that have turned the Cape peninsula into a tourist magnet are in danger of withering away within decades if the doomsday predictions of a growing number of scientists come true.
A library of evidence — including a major new United Nations report released on Friday — suggests that Africa will suffer more than any other continent from the effects of climate change during the course of the century.
Hundreds of millions of people are set to face severe shortfalls in food and drinkable water in the coming decades throughout the continent, but the effects may be most dramatically witnessed on the southernmost tip of the continent.
According to international and local experts, endemic plant kingdoms, fish stocks and unshielded coastal areas are all at risk from rising sea levels in the province where the waters of the Indian and Atlantic oceans collide.
The centuries-old, world-renowned wine region that lies within easy range of Cape Town will migrate towards the east in coming decades as the province becomes warmer and dryer from the north.
Farming in one of the country’s agricultural mainstays will become even harder and food ever scarcer as sparse water resources dry up.
And the poor will suffer the most as increasingly extreme weather conditions threaten their subsistence livelihoods and encourage diseases like malaria to travel further inland.
”The prospects are dire,” said Katherine Bunney, facilitator of a grouping of global-warming activist organisations, the South African Climate Action Network. ”We should be scared enough about the effects of climate change to want to do something about it. It is going to be catastrophic.”
Damage control
If the world succeeds to arrest and reverse carbon-dioxide emissions to pre-industrial levels over the next few decades, the damage will be limited, but not avoided, Bunney added. ”Even if we start acting now, we will still feel it. It is just a matter of degree.”
British economist Nicholas Stern, author of an influential report released last year on the economics of climate change, has warned that Africa will be hit hardest and soonest.
”You’d see more floods like you’ve seen in Mozambique in 2000; you’d see more droughts like you saw in Kenya in the late 1990s; there would be a serious threat to the water flow down the Nile on which 10 countries depend,” he told environmentalists on a recent trip to Cape Point on the tip of the peninsula.
Cape Point is in the Table Mountain National Park, home to several species of fynbos, or shrubland, vegetation millions of years old and endemic to the area. It also contains a marine protected area with several threatened fish species.
Stern said areas already hotter than others will feel temperature rises first, along with extended droughts and more frequent and severe flash floods.
”Africa … is more vulnerable in the sense that there are more people depending on agriculture and more people already in poverty,” he said.
South Africa’s two hottest and driest provinces, the Western Cape and the mostly rural Northern Cape, face the harshest impact.
Dennis Laidler, deputy director of climate change at the Western Cape environmental affairs department, said temperatures could rise between two and five degrees Celsius by the end of the century. ”The trend for the Western Cape will be towards desertification.”
Following the water
Global warming will see the Cape’s wine regions slowly shift hundreds of kilometres towards the Garden Route in the south-east and shrink as farmers move after wetter climes and switch to more resistant crops, predicted Bunney.
Other fruit crops, vegetables, wheat and even dairy farming in the province are also susceptible to weather changes.
Many indigenous plant species will migrate towards more water-rich parts of the province, causing some to become extinct along the way. The Western Cape’s fynbos vegetation constitutes one of six floral kingdoms in the world, with more plant species than the whole of Europe.
”The loss of biodiversity is an incredible economic loss for tourism,” Bunney said.
Other prospects include further urbanisation as agricultural activity declines, a threat to estuaries and the unique fish species they contain, as well as more wildfires — already a major concern in the province.
A 2005 Western Cape climate-change report warned of the potential effects of rising sea levels, although the extent was uncertain. ”Higher sea levels will require smaller storm events to overtop existing storm-protection measures,” it said.
With less frequent but more severe rainfalls, flooding will also become a bigger threat. ”In Cape Town many of the informal settlements are situated on the Cape Flats where the high water table and inadequate infrastructure make them particularly vulnerable to flooding,” said the report.
Laidler said the Western Cape government is working to curb carbon-dioxide emissions by growing renewable energy’s contribution to total production to 15% by 2015 — through wind power, among others.
There will be steps to limit water leaks, punish unproductive resource use and replace the government fleet with gas-powered vehicles. ”The cost of not doing anything will be huge,” he stressed.
Stern said he is encouraged that the threat is being taken increasingly seriously worldwide. ”But there is still the question: Will we as the world act quickly enough and strongly enough? We will find out in the next year or two.” — Sapa-AFP