South Africa's Survival Guide to Climate Change

By Sipho Kings and Sarah Wild

This is a survival guide. It rests on the idea that we could possibly survive a changing climate. Temperatures are already climbing, sea levels are rising and parts of South Africa are on their way to being uninhabitable. Life is already incredibly hard for many people and nobody will be exempt from climate change. Circumstances are going to get a lot more difficult very soon, and we need a plan.

This is a practical handbook that explores what climate change is likely to mean for us as South Africans, how we can prepare for it, and how we can – in our everyday lives – help to mitigate the impacts it will have.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781770106703

Sipho Kings

Sipho Kings was born in eSwatini, grew up in a village in Botswana and went to school in a town in Limpopo. Now he spends his days as the news editor of the Mail & Guardian, trying to treat issues such as climate change with the seriousness that they deserve. Starting as an intern at the Mail & Guardian, Sipho was the paper’s sole environment reporter for several years. Putting climate change on the paper’s front page has won him a dozen awards and seen him do a journalism fellowship at Harvard University.

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Contents

About the authors

Abbreviations

Introduction

Definitions

PART 1: SURVEY THE TERRAIN

1 Three scenarios: Gazing into the climate crystal ball

2 Climate now and what our cities will look like in the futur

3 How South Africa has already changed

4 Uncertainty

5 A short history of international climate negotiations

6 Why local matters

7 South Africa’s contribution to climate science

8 Calculate your carbon footprint

PART 2: REAL AND PRESENT DANGERS

9 Coastal erosion and development

10 Climate change and mental health

11 Aliens

12 Food waste

13 Transport

14 Oceans

PART 3: MAAK ’N PLAN

15 Individual versus collective action

16 Changes at home

17 On the right side of environmental law

18 Vote with your money: Shopping and investing

19 Technology

20 Plastics and waste

21 Cities

22 Politics: How to get climate change on the ballot

23 Farming

24 Companies

Final thoughts

References and links

Selected resources

Acknowledgements

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About the authors

SIPHO KINGS was born in eSwatini, grew up in a village in Botswana and went to school in a town in Limpopo. Now he lives in Johannesburg, where he moved to work at the Mail & Guardian, first as an intern, then as its environment reporter and now as its news editor.

As an environment reporter, he focused on the struggle between humans and the environment to coexist. His sobering analysis of the world earned him the title of ‘doomsday reporter’ from his editor. It has also won him a dozen awards and seen him zip off for a year to do a journalism fellowship at Harvard University.

As the M&G’s news editor, his focus now is on creating a space for journalists to do their best work.

In a previous life, SARAH WILD studied physics, electronics, and English literature in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didn’t work, so she read for an MSc in bioethics and health law. That sort of worked, and she is now a freelance science journalist, writing about particle physics, cosmology and everything in between for local and international publications. Sarah has written books, won awards and run national science desks. She can usually be found in a desert somewhere in the world, looking at telescopes, fossils or strange other-worldly creatures.

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Abbreviations

ANC • African National Congress

ASSAf • South African Academy of Science

CAT • Climate Action Tracker

CER • Centre for Environmental Rights

COP • Congress of the Parties

CSIR • Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

FTFA • Not-for-profit Food & Trees for Africa

GCRO • Gauteng City-Region Observatory

HSRC • Human Sciences Research Council

IPCC • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

JSE • Johannesburg Stock Exchange

NBI • National Business Initiative

NEMA • The National Environmental Management Act

PAIA • Promotion of Access to Information Act

PAJA • Promotion of Administrative Justice Act

SAB • South African Breweries

SAEON • South African Environmental Observation Network

SALGA • South African Local Government Association

SANBI • South African National Biodiversity Institute

SANRAL • South African National Roads Agency Limited

SASSI • Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative

SEMAs • Specific Environmental Management Acts

UNFCCC • United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

WWA • World Weather Attribution

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Introduction

You hold in your hands a ‘survival guide’. Not a primer, not a handbook. There are plenty of those on the internet, and those will have you alternating between boredom, undiluted terror, and hopeless apathy. That is why this is a survival guide: it rests on the idea that we are not all doomed; that the world’s last human will not take their dying breath on a scorched and barren plain devoid of life under a cloudy red sky; and that we are not victims of a changing climate, but active agents who are able to make a difference to improve the world around us.

If, as you read these first words, you already vehemently disagree, then perhaps this book is not for you. It will almost certainly make you more unhappy than if you read another book (although it might be better for your stress levels than Twitter or Facebook), and there are already enough angry and unhappy people in the world and in South Africa. The point of this book is to strip out the breast-beating that often accompanies activism, and can also seep into the way journalists report on climate change.

Waiting so long to do something about climate change has brought about two major consequences. First, we are on the back foot because greenhouse gases kept being pumped into the atmosphere as we dallied and, second, activists resorted to panicked tactics to convince people about the gravity of the situation. That panic has made its way into reporting, movies, series, books and our own consciousness – either inspiring people to take action or, dangerously, overwhelming us into inaction.

You hear it around the dinner table, on the edges of conferences, and especially frequently on a blisteringly hot day: ‘Well, what’s the point? We’re all going to die anyway and, besides, it is not as though we can do anything about it. I can’t stop China from polluting.’

It can also have a local flavour: ‘We have more important things to worry about in South Africa. Poverty, inequality, unemployment: we need to deal with that before we can start worrying about climate change.’ This argument frames climate change as something that is somehow separate from our lives, an issue that can be neatly stuffed into a box and stored under the bed.

With all these conversations happening, there is more than enough panic to go around. We want this book to help with the next step: doing something about our individual and collective impact on the world. We want it to be a handy guide; kept in your bag or on that shelf of books you actually read – that helps you navigate likely-imminent-but-also-avoidable catastrophe.

You will also notice that we don’t confine ourselves to climate change alone as we believe that carbon emissions are part of a larger problem: an unsustainable way of living. That is why you will find chapters, for example, on plastics and what is happening at our landfills. If the goal is to preserve the Earth for future generations, then the battle is not just about planetary warming or increased extreme weather events. It is also about clean water, healthy ecosystems, and seas that are not filled with plastic.

While this is a survival guide, rather than an introduction to the End-Of-Days, it is not a fairy tale to lull you to sleep at night. Our climate is changing, and if we do not take action, everyone will suffer – even you. The scale of this impact is why the benign label of ‘climate change’ is increasingly being changed to other versions, such as ‘climate breakdown’.

Globally, research shows that the vast majority of people accept that climate change is happening. But we still don’t think it will affect us. An interesting piece of research out of Yale University in 2018 found that while almost three-quarters of Americans believe that climate change is real, more than half thought that it would not affect them (in a phenomenon known as optimism bias).

We saw this in Cape Town, in the early stages of the water crisis, when people thought that they could not possibly run out of water; it was something that was going to happen to someone else. We are seeing it now in Gauteng, as the sounds of lawn sprinklers in wealthy suburbs drown out the gurgling of emptying taps in informal settlements.

Yes, this is a consequence of climate change, exacerbated by a growing population and demand for water, and the reality is that southern Africa’s water is getting scarcer, but it is also a story of service delivery and inequality, municipal mismanagement, alien plant species invading catchment areas, and a culture of using drinking water to irrigate lawns in the middle of the day. (This is not a common thing internationally. While not uniquely South African, it is rather strange behaviour, especially in a water-scarce country, where millions of people don’t have clean drinking water.)

Climate change is not a single homogenous issue, which is hopefully something that this survival guide will convey. It is a complex tapestry in which industry, local and international politics, history, entitlement, poverty, gender inequality, individual behaviour, and science interweave. This is both a good and bad thing. On the good side: since it has tendrils in all aspects of South African life, there are things every single person in this country can do to make a difference, even if only a small one. On the bad side, it means that it is a giant complex issue and, as South Africa and its people know, giant complex issues are difficult to resolve.

This is why we decided to call this book a ‘survival guide’. We are not denying there is a problem and that it is something to worry about, but we also want to highlight the issues and give practical examples of things you can do. There is more to saving the planet than climate change and, in the authors’ opinions, it is short-sighted to single out one issue (carbon emissions) in such a complex problem – so we have included others.

This is a book to be dipped in to whenever you feel like it and at any point in the book; each page has something interesting on it, in an easily digestible bite-sized nugget. We hope that you dog-ear it, make notes in the margin, share it, give it away, possibly even tear out one of the checklists to stick on your fridge (although the authors are divided on that). In case you want to see our sources, there is a list of references and links at the back of the book. However, while it does contain the aforementioned nuggets of wisdom and suggested actions, this book is not meant to be prescriptive. Some of these actions may be easy for you, something you want to implement in your life right now; others will be beyond your budget or impossible to maintain. That’s okay. Each little bit counts. And if someone shames you for not being able to do more, throw this book at them. Public shaming and virtue signalling do not make people care more about the environment. It just makes them apathetic and less likely to do what they can.

NOTE: while you hold in your hands a cohesive (although by no means comprehensive) survival guide, it was written by two people who often disagree. Although we have been reporting on climate change for years, sometimes even for the same publication (Sarah as a science journalist and Sipho as an envir­onment reporter), we often have different outlooks on how to deal with issues, what should be prioritised, and – importantly in journalism – how it should be reported on.

Where we have wildly divergent views, we note those – it seems disingenuous to pretend that we present a united front when we don’t – but also know that many enjoyable hours went into arguing about it.

Sarah and Sipho

Johannesburg, May 2019

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Definitions

Talking about climate starts with agreeing on words. From there we can argue about nuance and tone but first we need to agree on what our words mean. It is difficult to have a conversation in which the words themselves have different meanings for different people. It means you’re not so much talking past each other as having different conversations entirely. To ensure that, at least in this book, we’re all talking about the same thing, we have provided some key definitions, although we will also explain new concepts and words throughout the book as they come up.

Energy vs electricity

The distinction between electricity and energy is critical. Energy is the power needed to make things do something. You eat a cabbage leaf; your body turns that into a different form of energy, which you then use to sit on the couch. When we talk about energy we can mean fossil fuels, food, lightning, waves, natural gas or a hundred other things. Electricity is a specific kind of energy.

Electricity exists when something has an electric charge. The distinction is really important when talking about emissions and climate change. A country might say that it is reducing emissions from electricity by 80%, but electricity might only make up a fraction of their energy grid. Some countries rely on nuclear and natural gas for their energy. This is why the United Kingdom, the first country to start burning coal for energy on an industrial scale, has shut down most of its coal-fired power plants. In South Africa the distinction is less important, because the majority of our energy comes from electricity (from Eskom’s coal-fired power plants).

Carbon vs greenhouse gases

Strictly speaking, all the gases that float up into the atmosphere, trap heat, and warm the planet are called greenhouse gases. This is why we talk about the greenhouse effect. Carbon