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South Africa’s impressive social protection system could be used to help mitigate climate disasters

South Africa’s impressive social protection system could be used to help mitigate climate disasters
Zak Essa and Jack Calland
By Zak Essa and Jack Calland
18 Jul 2024
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Global innovations in social protection suggest that there are considerable climate action gains to be made by joining the dots rather than reinventing the wheel.

On 1 June 2024, Kariega in the Eastern Cape was deluged with more than 220 millimetres of rain — nearly half-a-year’s worth in 24 hours, enough to turn a football field into a shin-deep lake. In KwaNobuhle, an informal settlement on the outskirts of the town formerly known as Uitenhage, Phelokazi Brown fled her inundated home.

“As we were crossing the street, I had my three-year-old on my back, holding my nine-year-old’s hand,” she told the SABC. Her nine-year-old was swept away, and while trying to save him, her younger child, Alutho, was ripped from her back by the currents.  

Alutho’s body was found the next day.

The floods claimed at least nine more lives in the Eastern Cape and destroyed 2,000 homes. This comes less than a year after 11 people were killed by floods in the Western Cape, and two years after more than 450 people perished in the floods and landslides across KwaZulu-Natal that Wits University researchers conclude were its “most catastrophic in terms of lives lost, infrastructure damaged, and economical loss”. 

Although not all hazards are weather-related – fires that rip through informal settlements, for example – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts with high confidence that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of floods, coastal storms, wildfires, heatwaves, and droughts.

Intolerable living conditions


Like a guillotine, the burden of a changing climate is landing along the unequal contours of South Africa, turning environmental hazards into disasters for people living in poverty whose everyday living conditions are already intolerable – people like Brown and her family.

South Africa has an expansive social protection system designed to ensure that people are less vulnerable to poverty and social exclusion. It is best known for social grants, which reach up to 28 million people every month, and public employment programmes, which create more than 1.5 million jobs and livelihood opportunities annually.

Read more: EU’s von der Leyen vows defence push, climate continuity in bid for second term

The system is exceptional due to its relatively expansive and generous coverage, supported by political commitment and a constitutional mandate. Although not perfect by any means, it stands as one of the great achievements of democratic South Africa, lifting millions of people out of poverty. 

Yet as the spectre of climate change materialises, the social protection system needs to confront new pressures that threaten to reverse the gains that have been achieved so far. While the risks are daunting, global innovations in social protection suggest that there are considerable climate action gains to be made by joining the dots rather than reinventing the wheel.

What could climate-responsive social protection look like? 


In 2020, excess water from heavy monsoon rain in the states of Assam and Meghalaya in India surged into northern Bangladesh. Unable to drain quickly enough, the Jamuna and Brahmaputra river networks swelled ferociously, engulfing more than a million homes. 

More than 5.4 million people were affected, equivalent to the combined populations of Cape Town and Gqeberha. 

The devastation of a severe flood that sweeps away lives and livelihoods appears sudden. Yet rarely are floods entirely unpredictable. Advances in science and technology now allow for increasingly precise forecasts of when and where floods will occur, and their potential impact on communities. 

Using hydrological forecasts and predictive data analytics, the World Food Programme (WFP) determined on 4 July 2020 that people living along the Jamuna River were about to experience severe flooding. By 13 July, the WFP used mobile money to transfer BDT-4,500 (about R720) to more than 23,000 at-risk households. The flood peak occurred on 18 July: this means people received financial support five days before the peak. In previous floods in 2017 and 2019, WFP support arrived up to 100 days after the peak.

The difference in impact is significant. Researchers from Oxford University found that households that received the cash transfer were more likely to evacuate compared with non-recipient households. Their children were better nourished, and assets were better protected. Three months later, they reported higher well-being. 

These “anticipatory” cash transfers, which provide support to people in advance of a shock to help them reduce the impact of it and to manage in the immediate aftermath, have also been used successfully in other flood-prone communities in northern Nigeria and South Sudan.

Of course, some hazards are not always predictable. But timely, effective responses can still save lives and livelihoods.

Relentless series of extreme weather events


After a year of drought, Cyclone Idai made landfall in Malawi in March 2019. In March 2023, Cyclone Freddy – the strongest tropical cyclone on record – killed 1,200 people and displaced 700,000. Between the two cataclysms, Malawi endured a relentless series of extreme weather events and droughts, each one pushing households closer to the edge of survival.

With resources stretched thin and recurrent shocks battering its poorest people, Malawi is using the foundations of its social protection system to build new capacity to respond. Its two core programmes – cash transfers and public employment – are incorporating the agility to coordinate with disaster response sectors.

When hazards strike, or even before, the system can rapidly scale up in three ways: (1) increasing the value of transfers to existing recipients (vertical increases); (2) extending coverage to include more people (horizontal increases); and (3) offering complimentary services.

This flexibility is embedded into social protection programming in Niger, Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia and the Philippines.

These forms of social protection go a long way in helping communities absorb the impact of weather-related shocks, with short- and long-term benefits.

Towards climate-responsive social protection in South Africa


To confront the climate crisis, which the United Nations describes as the “greatest threat the world has ever faced”, we need to summon up the courage to profoundly reimagine society.

But when it comes to protecting people from the worst risks of climatic change, our neighbours and others in the Global South offer evidence that modest change can be effective. South Africa already has a strong technical and legislative foundation for linking the social protection system with climate action.

Read more: South Africa is a mega-biodiverse nation – the GNU must act to protect that

The first connection to make is between the social protection and disaster risk management systems. The Disaster Management Act underscores the necessity for an integrated and proactive approach to reduce vulnerability and mitigate the impacts of disasters like last month’s floods.

To achieve this the National Disaster Management Centre acts as the conductor, bringing together national, provincial, and local government alongside humanitarian organisations and local communities. Both social protection and disaster risk reduction share the common goal of reducing vulnerability. 

This link can build the absorptive capacity of people to cope with and bounce back from shocks. Social protection can lean on disaster risk reduction systems to incorporate early warning systems and risk assessments.

Emergency relief


Disaster responses can then use the administrative structures of social protection to quickly provide emergency relief to communities from provincial and municipal disaster relief grants. When crises loom, adaptive social protection should spring into action: adjusting swiftly to the specific hazard and people affected.

For people most at risk who already receive benefits, social protection should expand vertically by increasing the size or frequency of transfers. It should also extend support horizontally to new households that have become vulnerable. 

This is possible. South Africa has made strides in improving the accessibility of grant disbursement, such as enabling mobile money payments that do not require people to queue at South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) branches. But the social protection system is still deeply fragmented, operating across several siloed government departments and agencies. This creates unnecessary exclusion and inefficiencies, partly stemming from the lack of a single comprehensive register of recipients (both problems that a truly universal Basic Income Grant could overcome).

The agency responsible for cash transfers would also need additional funding and capacitation – Sassa’s vacancy rate has hovered around 60% for years due to budget cuts.

Second, it is important to connect social protection with climate adaptation so that people and communities can build the capacity to adjust to climate-related changes. While cash transfers play an important role in making vulnerable communities more resilient in response to shocks, more is needed to reduce their vulnerability in the first place. This is where public employment comes in. 

A huge amount of work is required to make vulnerable communities more adaptive to a changing climate in terms of infrastructure, housing, environmental management and livelihood diversification. At the same time, more than 12 million South Africans are without work. Climate-oriented public employment can help resolve this tension.

Public employment programmes


Public employment programmes can employ people to implement nature-based solutions, climate-proof physical infrastructure, restore wetlands, control erosion, manage coastlines, and support community risk reduction.

The Presidential Employment Stimulus, for example, supported the Duzi-uMngeni Conservation Trust that trained hundreds of young people in eThekwini as “Enviro-Champions”. The young people monitor water quality, search for blockages and illegal dumpsites, report leaking sewers, and support flood preparedness across the Umgeni catchment.

Other programmes in the employment stimulus have leveraged public employment to adapt farming methods to climate variability, established food gardens, cleared alien invasive species, and more.

The environment is also a priority sector of the Expanded Public Works Programme – the Working for Water, Working on Fire and Working for Wetlands programmes have employed tens of thousands of people to conserve, maintain, and improve the natural world. This work should be integrated, scaled up, and aligned strategically with the National Climate Adaptation Strategy.

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river.” the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu advised. “We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” Social protection is largely about pulling people out of the river. This is an important part of climate action.

Transformative


But at the end of the day, for climate action to be transformative, it cannot just be about protecting people’s lives so that they can continue living in poverty. 

Transformative climate action means tackling the structural question that has plagued South Africa: why are the lives of people in KwaNobuhle, Quarry Road West and Gugulethu far more vulnerable and exposed to hazards like flooding than people in uMhlanga and Constantia?

This, of course, takes one far beyond social protection or climate change. It forces us to confront an economic and social arrangement that makes people vulnerable to disasters and other risks in the first place.

Social protection is just one step on that long, but necessary, path towards climate and social justice. DM

Zak Essa is a Programme Analyst supporting the Presidential Employment Stimulus. Jack Calland is a Research Associate at J-PAL Africa in Johannesburg, working on labour markets and social protection. They both write in their personal capacity. 

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