Climate change and rising waters

By R.W. Johnson

Living in Cape Town is mainly a pleasure. but every now and again you get a fright. A few years ago I went to visit a friend in hospital out at Blaauwberg. It was dusk when I came out of the hospital, and as I approached my car a woman came running up to me, begging me for a lift. She said she’d been visiting a friend in hospital but due to a family emergency her lift home was no longer available. I asked where she wanted to go, and it wasn’t too far out of my way, so I told her to hop in and I would drop her there. So off we drove.

To cut a long story short, she grabbed my house keys, pulled out a knife, and threatened that I couldn’t have my keys back unless I paid her R4,000. I inwardly debated my options and decided not to get into a tussle with that knife. So I paid what she asked, whereupon she said the man she worked for – a pimp of some sort, doubtless – also needed a cut.

By this time I had realised that she was drugged up and very dangerous. In the end she got R5,000 off me, at which point I said, why don’t you just keep the keys? She angrily threw them in my face and got out of the car. I realised that I had got away lightly: I still had my life, my car and even my keys. It was a signal lesson. Out there on the Cape Flats, all manner of dangerous characters lurk. Normally I don’t meet them. But they are always there.

I feel somewhat the same about climate change. I came across a recent report which said that the widely adopted target of keeping the global temperature increase down to +1.5 degrees Celsius was bound to be exceeded, and that the world was on track for a temperature increase in the +2.5–2.9C range. This is all very dire. It may well be that all the other reasons for disliking Donald Trump will shrink into insignificance next to his typical KnowNothing insistence that climate change is a “hoax”, and his consequent decision to cancel and abolish the many sensible attempts to ameliorate the situation. It is no particular consolation to know that Florida will probably be badly affected and that Mar-a-Lago is likely to be flooded.

South Africa has its own share of head-in-the-sand climate change refuseniks – Gwede Mantashe, for example, proudly proclaims himself a “coal fundamentalist”, putting him in the same camp as Trump. Of course, there are many other reasons for regarding Mantashe as a blockhead, just as there are with Trump.

Climate change will bring all manner of challenges. More violent storms, more droughts, more floods, desertification – and even landslides. On 28 May this year, the Swiss Alpine village of Blatten (population 300) was annihilated by a landslide caused by the effect of climate change on a nearby glacier.

It will also have some pleasant results. There are already hundreds of dolphins playing off the Welsh coast, and off Devon and Cornwall octopuses have become common in the now warmer waters. Not to mention the greatly increased possibilities of navigation through Arctic waters and the enhanced likelihood of prospecting for mineral and oil wealth beneath the Arctic. Already much of southern Europe has become uncomfortably hot in summer while Britain and Scandinavia move towards a Mediterranean climate.

However, from a human point of view the most alarming aspect of climate change is the consequent rise of sea levels. Even at a +1.5C equilibrium, sea levels will rise by about a centimetre a year for much of the 21st century. And, as we know, temperature gain will not stay steady at +1.5C. The big worry is the future of the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which have been melting at four times the normal rate since the 1990s. If both these sheets melt completely, sea levels will rise by 12 metres.

Long before sea rise reaches such levels, the world will face a major crisis. All told, some 230 million people live within one metre above sea level, and a billion people within ten metres. In other words, even a rise of one metre above current levels will cause what the climate experts refer to as “catastrophic inland migration”, as people flee from the advancing waters. Many low-lying islands will be completely submerged, and the future of entire low-lying countries like Bangladesh (population 172 million) will be at risk. Even contemplating such a future conjures up visions of the Flood and Noah’s Ark or, more recently, the Kevin Costner film Waterworld.

But this is not fiction or Biblical myth. Already a rise in sea levels of between one and two metres is guaranteed. That alone will be enough to totally alter all our maps of the world. The whole of East Anglia could vanish, as could the whole vast flatland of Cape Agulhas. The bottom half of the Cape peninsula could become a separate island. And many communities which stay above water could find all their connections severed – roads, electric cables, telephone wires, pipelines.

What is striking is that no one seems to be preparing for this. The sensible thing to do would be to send teams to the Netherlands to learn from the world experts in land reclamation and the building of dams and sea walls – and then to start building one’s defences as fast as one can. Naturally, I tend to look at Cape Town, which is extremely vulnerable to sea rise – though so are many other coastal towns and areas.

For example, as things stand the lower half of Cape Town’s central business district (including the Town Hall and Parliament) will be flooded – but a sea wall might save it. The Cape Flats, with its vast population, is a major problem – even now, flooding is a major risk there because of high groundwater levels. But some areas – particularly many up-market coastal settlements – pose almost insuperable problems.

Think of Llandudno, Sea Point, Green Point, Clifton, Camps Bay and Bantry Bay, all with a great deal of expensive real estate. The whole appeal of such areas is based upon their being right next to the sea. One could try to protect them by building a really high sea wall all along the sea-front, but that would, of course, ruin much of their present raison d’etre and appeal.

Similar problems would face Kalk Bay, Hout Bay, Muizenberg, Simonstown, Fish Hoek and Strand. Having property next to the beach is still seen as a major selling-point, but by the same token it is also the most vulnerable. As yet this doesn’t seem to have affected property values, but that is bound to happen. Properties now selling for R20 million or R30 million could become unsaleable.

And that is what I mean by saying that climate change is a bit like the lady who accosted me with a knife. You can live a long time in Cape Town without being very conscious of its notoriously violent underworld – until you run into it, after which it’s difficult to get it out of your mind. Similarly, once you’ve thought through what climate change really means, you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s always there. Now, as I drive around Cape Town I find myself continually assessing the altitude of different areas, imagining some high and dry though cut off from their surrounds, while others are either waterlogged or disappear permanently.

What strikes you is how comprehensive sea defences need to be. You could build a sea wall along the front of Simonstown, for example, but to be of any use you would have to extend the wall for many miles north and south of Simonstown itself. One also realises that while Cape Town is a place where the mountains often come down into the sea – which means that higher ground is almost always available – a lot of that higher ground is currently off limits for human habitation because it is, quite rightly, a nature reserve.

But how long will such restrictions last, once the waters begin to rise and people begin to stampede inland? I have a nasty feeling that the whole of the Cape Peninsula which remained above water would become a built-up area.

One knows that there is no shortage of tasteless people who are anyway always building higher and higher up in what used to be green and mountainous areas. Under Patricia de Lille’s mayoralty, an awful lot of people seemed to get permission to build where they shouldn’t have. But that would be nothing compared to the vast human tide which would be spurred to move from the Cape Flats. Where would they go?

There are also many ironies. The people living in millionaire properties along the Camps Bay sea front would be in big trouble – but those in the Imizamu Yethu squatter camp in Hout Bay who have built far up the mountainside would be sitting pretty.

Naturally, one could repeat this exercise with respect to Durban, Port Elizabeth or many smaller coastal towns. South Africa is blessed with a very long coastline – but that simply means that we face a much bigger task. How can we save the Garden Route? Or the glorious subtropical coast of KwaZulu-Natal? What is certain is that we need to start thinking about this future – and working to make it liveable – right now.

FEATURED IMAGE: Cape Town’s famous Atlantic seaboard – sought after today, submerged tomorrow? Wikimedia Commons. 

2 thoughts on “Climate change and rising waters”

  1. DAVID WILLERS

    Excellent summary. Many years ago the writer Michael Drin did a dystopian SABC radio series entitled “The day the Sea came back” – which predicated that as a result of an underwater geological disturbance the Cape Flats were submerged and Cape Town and Table Mountain became an island. Lots of social upheaval ensued and the ‘bergies’ were the folk to fear.
    The reality of impending tidal rises can be seen at Bangor in north Wales, close to where I live on the Menai Strait. This is a part of the world where four metre plus tides are common and even a small increase in ocean levels of a few centimetres can amplify the tidal effect. As a result of flooding caused by this phenomenon, Bangor has built a raised breakwater, or a wall if you like, on the seafront, at vast expense, in anticipation of what is coming our way because of global warming. I understand comparable building is going on in many other parts of the UK. But there are parts like East Anglia where this would be impracticable, and here the challenge is met with what is called managed retreat. Seafront properties have lost all value overnight and insurance is unavailable.
    Rising sea levels will lead to unimaginable global refugee numbers in years to come. Another cause of social unhappiness.

  2. Bill Johnson has a local to global talent for challenging persons, groups, institutions and societies,; and short-term present lives, to think longer-term, and to work now for a liveable future. He sets up waves of walls for us to tackle, to contest, and to climb; even as our surfing and costal havens seem bound to change. And what if what he writes comes to be? And what if a person with a knife, meets up with you, then what is there then to do? Seems to me the knife was a sort of a kill bill at all costs nightmare?

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