RW Johnson: Cape gangsters, rising sea levels - scarily ever present once they've invaded your mind
Key topics:
Climate change threatens Cape Town with rising seas and flooding risks.
Sea level rise could displace millions and submerge low-lying areas.
Urgent need for coastal defences and planning to protect vulnerable zones.
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By RW Johnson
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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, beseeching me for a lift. She said she’d been visiting a friend in hospital and then there had been a family emergency which had resulted in her lift home no longer being 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 hold of my house keys, pulled out a large 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 in the land of Cape Flats gangs all manner of dangerous characters lurk. Normally I don’t meet them. But they are always there.
I feel a bit 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 – 2.9 Celsius 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 is likely to 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. The Swiss Alpine village of Blatten (population 300) was completely annihilated on May 28 this year by a landslide caused by the affect 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 + 1.5 C equilibrium sea levels will rise at approximately 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 around the Earth will rise by 12 metres.
Long before sea rise reaches such levels the world faces a major crisis. All told some 230 million people live within one metre of sea level and a billion people live within ten metres above current sea levels. 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 alter completely 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. Even 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 we 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 it’s possible that the building of a sea wall might save it. The Cape Flats, with their vast population, are a major problem – even as it is flooding is always 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. As yet, having property next to the beach is 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 in the future 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 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 on the Camps Bay seafront 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, after all – but that simply means that we face a much bigger task. How can we save the Garden Route ? Or the glorious sub-tropical 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.