One of the South Africa’s leading researchers on climate change is also one of the country’s top science journalists — Leonie Joubert.
The recipient of the 2007 Ruth First Fellowship, her writing is helping to lead the call for a greater understanding of what global Âwarming means for Africa.
For the Ruth First Fellowship, Joubert spent time with five different communities around South Africa, getting to grips with the impact climate change is having on “ordinary” South African families.
The result is Boiling Point — Joubert’s new book, which examines how people already struggling with poverty are experiencing even more hardship as a result of global warming.
“Most of these people live on a knife-edge because of poverty and their dependence on an already capricious natural environment,” said Joubert at the book’s launch in Cape Town.
The book is Joubert’s second on climate change. Her first — Scorched: South Africa’s Changing Climate — won an honorary 2007 Sunday Times Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award.
Scorched was the first book to give an exclusively South African perspective on climate change. It took a vivid journey through South Africa’s unique landscapes, examining the effects of climate change as they set in, giving local weight to a global problem.
Boiling Point takes the journey a step further by examining how South Africa’s people are dealing with climate change and its mostly drastic effects.
“It’s always thrilling to see a body of work being released — but I get extremely anxious about it, because one never knows how it will be received by the public,” says Joubert, who feels strongly about the need for people to take responsibility for their role in preserving our atmosphere.
Joubert pointed out the interÂconnectivity that we all experience with the environment in which we live.
“The conservationist and writer John Muir said that if you tug on a single thing in nature, you find it attached to the rest of the world,” she said.
“Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climate crisis. Tugging on a thread of our shared atmosphere in China or the United States, by shunting pollution into the skies there, is causing the fabric of local weather patterns to unravel half a world away.”
Joubert first felt the need to write about climate change in 2003 when she was doing her master’s degree, specialising in science journalism. She was given the opportunity to travel with a team of scientists to Marion Island in the South Indian Ocean, where they were studying the impact of climate change on the environment. “It was only meant to be one feature story, but the subject proved to be so big, and have so many issues, that I kept going,” Joubert said. “I still haven’t run out of material yet.”
Joubert, a guest lecturer at this year’s SciFest Africa — South Africa’s national science festival in Grahamstown — explained that climate change is an important issue because it “is caused mostly by pollution coming from wealthy countries and communities, but it is the poor who are least able to cope with the environmental changes that result from that pollution.” She sums it up as “a huge moral issue for our planet”.
“I think if more people paid attention — really paid attention — to what the scientists are telling us about the future of life as we know it, they’d have trouble sleeping at night,” she said.