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South Africa’s Survival Guide to Climate Change: Buy, borrow or steal it

South Africa’s Survival Guide to Climate Change: Buy, borrow or steal it

A recent survey has found a shocking level of ignorance in South Africa about climate change — 59% of people surveyed had not heard of climate crisis at all, even though 35% reported that climate conditions for agricultural production had got worse.

Based on its findings, Afrobarometer concludes that there is “a need for policy-makers and activists to build informed core populations that understand climate-change threats”. In this regard, South Africa’s Survival Guide to Climate Change (Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2019) by journalists Sipho Kings and Sarah Wild may be just what’s needed.

First of all, don’t be put off by the title! The Survival Guide is not written in a state of exaggerated panic or hysteria, but it does convey the gravity and full implications of the crisis that will engulf us.

It’s also not didactic, judgmental of y/our own climate-damaging habits (and the book will show you that you have many). Neither is it superior or lecture-y as books on portentous subjects sometimes are… What it is, is accessible and unpretentious. Full of simply presented facts (many useful for your own advocacy), references and links; it is evidence-heavy but easy, analytical of the most up to date science of climate change.

And most importantly, by breaking the book into three parts – titled Survey the terrain, Real and Present Dangers and Maak ’n Plan’ — it chops the often intimidating and vast notion of climate change into accessible chunks.

It really is a practical survival guide, which will have uses for different people.

One of the things the authors understand is that fear and panic can be debilitating rather than motivating, that’s why, they write: “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.” So, throughout its pages, the book reveals some glimmers of hope and things you can do as active agents in climate change rather than victims.

We made it after all. Only we can unmake it.

So on the theme of hope: before reading the Survival Guide I had no idea how advanced or respected South Africa’s contribution to climate science is. The authors, for example, tell us that “unlike other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa has a cache of research that tells us how things are changing”. They admit – take note academics – that “research is strongly skewed towards ecological and biophysical sciences, rather than the social implications and how it is going to affect people and communities”. Nonetheless, they point out that the CSIR has mapped the risks and vulnerabilities for every settlement in the country and that this information is available online at the Green Book.

Yes, go and have a look now.

This makes it possible to draw parallels between our response to climate change and our response to AIDS. South Africa is “warming at twice the global average”. That makes us one of the ground zeros for its worst impact. However, should we force politicians to discover the political will to act, we will also discover we have a firm foundation of knowledge and capacity on which to build.

Second, as with so many other things, much of the policy and legal framework has already been put in place, starting with the Constitutional injunction that: “everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well being”. Thus, in a chapter they devote to environmental law the authors start by pointing out that we have “great environmental laws; the problems usually occur when it comes to implementing them.”

Sounds familiar?

In this regard, inaction by the government – or continued pussy-footing around grand polluters like Sasol which, we are told, “emits more carbon than countries like Ireland or Portugal” – is shockingly short-sighted and expensive.

Be warned, climate change will impact adversely on every area of policy from the affordability of National Health Insurance (because it is going to increase the prevalence of illness) to the fertility and yield of land that is redistributed. Treasury and the President should read the book to be convinced that it’s far better that we invest heavily up-front than spend years chasing our tails at a cost that could have been prevented.

As we are now doing with Aids.

Finally, the book really does help us to see the things that we can change in our lives; in our households, our eating habits, our modes of transport and how seriously we take our responsibilities as active citizens.

Kings and Wild’s book reminded me how in the 21st Century scientific knowledge of our world – evidence – is a vital ingredient to spur and arm activism. Sadly though, scientific knowledge of how our brains work may the point to reasons for our ultimate undoing.

In How Your Brain Works, a New Scientist publication, the writers point out that despite humans having a “cognitive complexity unseen in other species” … “human genetic diversity is abysmally low”. The problem is that “our intellectual prowess must still work alongside hardwired primitive traits” and “cognitive biases” such as jealousy and greed. As a result, they warn:

“ … climate change looms and a mass extinction is already under way, yet there is little sign of a concerted effort to change our ways… Humans pay less attention to future risk compared with present risk, something that makes us routinely take decisions that are good in the short term but disastrous in the long term. This is behind our inability to fully fathom the risks of climate change.”

Bearing this out, as I read the concluding pages of the Survival Guide I couldn’t help remembering how when Jacques Pauw’s book, The President’s Keepers, was published in late 2017, it literally flew off the shelves. It was more popular than Harry Potter. It was even available as a pirated version on PDF – with the author and publishers’ tacit consent. People were responding to a short-term threat.

I don’t yet know about the sales of the Survival Guide, but based on its relevance and importance it ought to be in similar demand.

I doubt it is. None the less, if I were you I would try and think long. Buy it, borrow it or steal it. In the months and years ahead, you may just find it will help you to survive. MC

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