Climate change in South Africa: Risks and opportunities for climate-resilient development in the IPCC Sixth Assessment WGII Report

Ziervogel, Gina; Lennard, Christopher; Midgley, Guy F.; New, Mark; Simpson, Nicholas P.; Trisos, Christopher H.; Zvobgo, Luckson

doi:10.17159/sajs.2022/14492

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…This commentary considers the City of Cape Town’s 2022–2027 Integrated Development Plan (IDP) 5 and its two previous iterations 6 , 7 . In a context of high inequality and amidst need to urgently ramp up climate action to secure a liveable future for all 1 , 8 , 9 , it reflects upon commitments to planning for urban sustainability under a changing risk landscape due to climate change and persistent socio-economic inequality. We consider the extent to which the IDP captures key tenets of CRD identified by the IPCC and how it charts progress towards city-to-city learning for city-level development planning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate-resilient development planning for cities: progress from Cape Town

Simpson

Ferreira

et al. 2023

npj Urban Sustain

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate-resilient development planning for cities: progress from Cape Town

Simpson

Ferreira

et al. 2023

npj Urban Sustain

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“…Some of the South African assessments mentioned the challenge of achieving sufficient stakeholder engagement, in line with the findings of the Preston (2012) and Jurgilevich et al (2017) reviews. This raises questions about what additional capacities and methodological design features are needed to enable broader and deeper engagement for ensuring societal relevance and resulting action around climate change adaptation (Ziervogel et al, 2022).…”

Section: Reviewing Assessments In the South African Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

A co-produced national climate change risk and vulnerability assessment framework for South Africa

Ziervogel,

Taylor

2023

Front. Clim.

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IntroductionThere are mounting demands to undertake climate risk and vulnerability (CRV) assessments for policy, planning, funding, insurance, and compliance reasons. In Africa, given the adaptation imperative, this is particularly important. Increasingly, it has become clear that sub-national assessments are needed to inform adaptation practice. However, there has been relatively little guidance on how to undertake these more local assessments and aggregate them making it difficult for national governments to know the extent and variability of climate vulnerability and risk across the country.MethodsIn South Africa, the national government, led by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE), undertook to establish a common framework to guide the development and review of CRV assessments. This paper presents the framework that was co-developed through a series of engagements with stakeholders active in implementing and supporting CRV assessments.ResultsThe framework is intended to provide guidance on what to consider when undertaking CRV assessments within diverse South African contexts in order to enable alignment, comparison, and aggregation between them and work towards an effective climate adaptation response across scales. Rather than standardizing a methodology, the framework promotes the use of a standard set of concepts as the basis for each assessment and profiles a diversity of methods, tools and data sources for applying the concepts in a contextually sensitive way. This provides a flexible yet structured sequence of three interlinked steps in a risk and vulnerability assessment process, namely: (1) Planning, (2) Scoping and (3) Assessing. The framework guides users through the choice and application of three assessment depths, depending on decision-context, resourcing and extent of pre-existing data and information. It encourages the integration of participatory and indicator-based methods through an impact chain approach, profiling more than 30 freely available tools and resources. This process builds a strong evidence base and a deepening set of engagements and shared understanding between relevant stakeholders, upon which to act.DiscussionThis South African process can provide insight and support for actors driving the climate agenda in other countries looking to develop comparable assessments as the basis to drive equitable and transformative climate action and learning.

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“…While the impacts of climate change on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to gain traction (see for example, Affoh et al, 2022;Berck et al, 2018;Ofori et al, 2021), and whereas it is well established that the SADC region is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate risks (Adaawen et al, 2019;Waema & Njue, 2020;Ziervogel et al, 2022), studies focusing on the impact of climate change in the SADC region as a whole remain rare but are still needed. However, a growing body of literature, though, has concentrated on a countrylevel examination (Militao et al, 2022;Muringai et al, 2020;Verschuur et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Climate Change on Food Insecurity in The Southern African Development Community

Mavodyo

2023

JDE

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Despite the fact that the Southern African region is one of the most vulnerable to climate change, research on the impact of climate change on food insecurity in the SADC region as a whole is scarce. We make two major contributions to the literature. First, we examine how climate change affects a group of SADC countries. Second, in contrast to previous studies, we supplement an analysis of climate change on crop yield with an analysis of climate change on other food insecurity indicators such as food affordability, malnutrition, and a food insecurity measure. Relying on the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, results show that precipitation has a statistically significant impact on all four indicators of food insecurity in both its linear and non-linear forms; precipitation has the greatest impact on food affordability, followed by its negative impact on malnutrition; and temperature -whether in its linear or nonlinear form- has no statistically significant influence on all four indicators of food insecurity. However, temperature change gains statistical significance in explaining movements in food security after controlling for the interaction of temperature and precipitation. The policy implications of these findings highlight the need to increase precipitation availability in the SADC region by designing sustainable irrigation programs while also implementing climate change mitigation initiatives alongside those designed to ensure food affordability and access to a healthy and decent meal, particularly for the poor.

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Climate change in South Africa: Risks and opportunities for climate-resilient development in the IPCC Sixth Assessment WGII Report

Abstract: WGII report 1 ), with direct relevance for southern Africa and South Africa. These issues are climate services, climate change literacy, indigenous and local knowledge, and climate finance.

Cited by 9 publications

References 21 publications

Climate-resilient development planning for cities: progress from Cape Town

Climate-resilient development planning for cities: progress from Cape Town

A co-produced national climate change risk and vulnerability assessment framework for South Africa

The Impact of Climate Change on Food Insecurity in The Southern African Development Community

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