Various family members grieve at the United Methodist Church of South Africa in Clermont, near Durban, on April 13, 2022 of the 4 children that passed away in the surrounding area following heavy rains and floods. - Residents on April 13, 2022 started sifting through the remains of shattered homes after floods and landslips stoked by record rains devastated the South African city of Durban city and surrounding area, killing at least 59 and leaving many missing. (Photo by PHILL MAGAKOE / AFP) /
Nokwazi Mbambo, 19, was in her bed in Lindelani, an informal settlement in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, listening to the rain thundering down on the corrugated iron roof of her family’s shack.
She got up from her bed and went to cuddle up next to her mother.
Someone was knocking on the door, urgently. Mbambo and her mother ignored it, willing themselves to fall asleep.
Then there was a knock again. This time there was shouting too.
Mbambo and her mother got up to open the door, and the two found their distraught neighbour on their doorstep. “Your house is moving!” the neighbour screamed frantically.
The next moment, there was a huge gust of wind and a loud bang.
The corrugated iron roof that sheltered the Mbambos just moments ago had blown away.
It was too late to save their belongings. As they scrambled out of their home, they grabbed what few things they could.
They made their way to their neighbour’s house, where they would spend the night, watching their home being washed away.
“I lost everything. My school books, my ID, even my laptop,” she says.
She is in a make-shift shelter in the Ntuzuma F district community hall, about 15km from her former home. The shelter was set up by the state for people displaced by the floods, which left 448 people dead and more than 8 500 homes destroyed by the government’s count.
The community hall was supposed to be temporary lodging, but six months later, Mbambo and her mother are still there.
Outside the hall, tents have now been set up to accommodate smaller families.
Not far away, on the streets of Durban’s city centre is Mfundo Shezi, 32. On the night of the floods, while searching for shelter from the rain, he watched as his ID and a month’s supply of HIV treatment were washed away.
“I lost my ID book, even all my blankets and clothes were washed away. Even my medication. I had a container for a whole month’s [antiretroviral] tablets.”
When people with HIV aren’t on treatment, the virus can multiply in their blood, which makes it harder for their bodies to fight off infections.
Almost 9 000km away, in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh, world leaders have gathered for the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 27) running from 6 to 18 November.
It’s the first COP meeting held in Africa, a region that’s likely to bear the brunt of a changing climate fuelled by CO2 emissions, since countries started burning coal to fuel their economies around the mid-1800s, experts say.
A rainstorm such as the one that caused the KwaZulu-Natal floods, for instance, could happen twice as often as they occurred 150 years ago, when the atmosphere’s average temperature was 1.2ºC lower, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution Service.
In Egypt, politicians will make plans — again — to keep to the goal of the Paris Agreement, which came into effect in 2016 and aims to prevent the average global temperature from rising by more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was adopted by 196 countries, including South Africa, and is legally binding.
The treaty says we should aim to keep within a 1.5ºC rise, as this would curb the worst effects of climate change. We need to do this by reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide trap heat in the atmosphere, making the Earth warmer.
But it’s already too late for Mbambo. She says her life has been changed forever.
And a report released in 2021 shows it’s not only Mbambo facing such floods — the world is way behind on achieving the Paris Agreement’s targets.
The report shows that there’s a 50:50 chance that temperatures will exceed the 1.5ºCmark in the next five years.
But, even if we go past the 1.5 degree mark, it is possible to keep the temperature below 2ºC. If we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions drastically until 2050, or even completely stop them from increasing after 2050, it is possible to stay on track.
In September 2021, South Africa released a revised version of the action plan signatories of the Paris Agreement must set up, called the nationally determined contribution (NDC), which is much more ambitious than we pledged to achieve in 2015. Instead of capping our emissions to the equivalent of up to 510 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030, we’re now allowing ourselves to only go up to 420 million tonnes.
Data from Climate Action Tracker shows that despite the revised cuts, South Africa will not reduce emissions enough to meet its NDC target range for 2030.
Back at the shelter, Mbambo says she struggles to concentrate when doing her school work because there are children playing in the community hall. Some days she doesn’t go to her college because she’s often short of transport money to get there.
Shezi’s health has taken a knock.
He went two weeks without his antiretroviral treatment, because the nonprofit centre where he gets his medication, TB HIV Care, was closed because of the floods.
He was turned away from a local hospital, where he was looking to get his pills, because he didn’t have his ID. Administrators need this document to open a file for people who aren’t already in their system.
This was the first time since starting treatment in 2021 that he didn’t take his medication every day.
Mbambo is grateful for shelter from the rain, a mattress she shares with her mom, food every day and a clinic down the road. But she wants her old life back.
“I want to start afresh next year.”
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.