South Africa's Survival Guide to Climate Change , livre ebook

Pan Macmillan South Africa - Sarah Wild , Sipho Kings

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

128 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

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.

Sujets

Sciences et techniques

Climate change

Weather

Nature

Informations

Publié par	Pan Macmillan South Africa
Date de parution	01 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770106703
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0700€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Sipho Kings and Sarah Wild
Illustrations and infographics by Robert Dersley
MACMILLAN

First published in 2019
by Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN: 978-1-77010-669-7
E-ISBN: 978-1-77010-670-3
© in the text and editorial arrangement Sipho Kings and Sarah Wild 2019
© in the illustrations and infographics Robert Dersley 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Note that many of the sidebar definitions are drawn and/or adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary.
Editing by Jane Bowman
Proofreading by Kelly Norwood-Young
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg
Illustrations and infographics by Robert Dersley
Cover design by publicide

0
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

0
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.

0
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

0
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