Minister warns about ‘climatic armageddon’

The Western Cape could be facing an armageddon as a result of climate change. So said the new provincial agriculture minister in the Western Cape, Gerrit van Rensburg, at an agribusiness and climate change conference in Somerset West.
Quoting Dr Guy Midgley of the Kirstenbosch Research Centre, he warned of an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as floods and drought.
The southwestern Cape will become drier and hotter and the winter rainfall season will be shorter. Heat stress will take its toll on crops as heat units increase and cold units, vital to the fruit industry, decrease.
The twin scourges of hail and fire will most probably be felt more dramatically in the next few decades.
Van Rensburg said effective disaster management should play a vital role in mitigating the extremes that climatologists predict. He expressed the fear that state emergency measures would not be adequate to deal with disasters, adding that currently, all natural disasters were treated on an ad hoc basis.
“Disaster relief funding is controlled by the National Treasury under the Division of Revenue Act,” explained Van Rensburg. “There’s no consistency and people don’t know what kind of assistance, if any, they can expect after a disaster, and when they can expect it.
“In the Western Cape we’ve received R90 million since 2006. However, the province is still waiting for R70 million for the 2007 floods in the Eden district and R400 million for uninsured damage during the November 2008 floods.” – Sonja Burger