Nomvula Mokonyane: A primer for week one at Environmental Affairs

I. The Ideal

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”

So said Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu many moons ago. Some time later, when social media had become the prevailing mechanism through which human beings filtered their experience of the world, his words were placed against a digital backdrop of lovely white flowers. Now a meme, the words were shared widely.

Because the alternative is too dark to contemplate—and because we could all use a pick-me-up to stave off the daily encroachment of the sixth mass extinction—let us apply Tutu’s meme to the case of Nomvula Mokonyane. Let us hope that our new environmental affairs minister, during her first week in office, spends her time reading. Let us go beyond hope, to envisioning, and let us picture a stack of reports in the middle of her carved hardwood desk.

Top of the pile in this dream scenario would be a document called “South Africa’s Third National Communication under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, a text that those in the know had helpfully abbreviated as the “TNC report”. Mokonyane would sit down, order her secretary to hold her calls, and ponder the orange and turquoise cover, with its graphics of wind-farms and solar panels and a family of five holding hands. Coming in at 351 glossy pages, she would notice, the report had been published by the Department of Environmental Affairs in March 2018, with the close assistance of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, a world-leading South African institution when it came to the hard facts of climate change. Impressed, Mokonyane would flip through to the report’s executive summary, where she would be taken aback by the following:

“South Africa has been warming significantly over the period 1931-2015. Over the western parts of the country, including much of the Western and Northern Cape, and also in the east over Gauteng, Limpopo and the east coast of KwaZulu-Natal, the observed rate of warming has been 2 °C/century or even higher—in the order of twice the global rate of temperature increase.”

“A key feature of the projected climate change futures of South Africa is that temperatures are to increase drastically under low mitigation. For the far-future period of 2080-2099, temperature increases of more than 4°C are likely over the entire South African interior, with increases of more than 6°C plausible over large parts of the western, central and northern parts. Such increases will also be associated with drastic increases in the number of heatwave days and very hot days, with potentially devastating impacts on agriculture, water security, biodiversity and human health.”

“A 4°C warming by 2100 would subject 47% of the land area and almost 74% of the world population to deadly heat, which could pose existential risks to humans and mammals alike unless massive adaptation measures are implemented.”

“South Africa is most likely to experience climate change impacts primarily affecting water resources. Due to South Africa’s arid to semi-arid climate, less than 9% of annual rainfall ends up in rivers and only about 5% recharges groundwater aquifers. As a result, South Africa is classified as a water-stressed country which makes the country even more vulnerable to expected climate change impacts.”

“In addition to water impacts, climate change will also impact sanitation. In 2013, municipalities increased the supply of sewerage and sanitation services by 6.2%, raising the number of consumer units with access to sanitation facilities from 9.4 million in 2012 to almost 10 million in 2013 (StatsSA, 2014). Increased flooding and storms, however, could result in damage to infrastructure and potable water supplies.”