First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

About 35,000 competitors got a taste of the future scientists have long warned about when the Cape Town Cycle Tour was stopped after just a few hours in 2017 because of a 100km/h wind.

Cellphone video footage of the race showed cyclists toppling over, even a truck blown on to its side.

It was the first time in 40 years that the Cape Town Cycle Tour, which attracts riders from around the world, had to be cancelled. Stopped by an extreme weather event.

Strong winds prevent cyclists from from riding at the Cape Town Cycle Tour in Cape Town in 2017. (Screenshot: YouTube)

And it is something we are going to have to get used to as the hand of climate change tightens its grip.

The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published last month, updating models and projections regarding the impact of the climate crisis.

The report projected higher mean wind speeds along the west coast of South Africa with increases in fire conditions.

For a country that markets its sunny skies and temperate weather to hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, climate change is set to be a killer to South Africa’s multibillion-rand tourist industry.

It is a global concern, but a major problem in South Africa is that there is a lack of data on its effect on tourism.

Jennifer Fitchett, an associate professor in Physical Geography at Wits University, is trying to change that.

Many in the tourism industry, she says, see the climate crisis as a far-off threat.

“When we interview people, particularly along the coastline, the accommodation establishments just say, ‘Oh, well, that’ll happen after we’ve retired’ or that they will have died by 2100,” explains Fitchett.

“The problem is that long before the actual model tells you are under water, you are going to have problems with flooding, water damage to property and all the rest.”

Fitchett was recently involved in a study that assessed what tourists thought of South Africa’s weather.

She and her colleagues sifted through nearly 6,000 online tourist reviews on the TripAdvisor website, looking for mentions about South Africa’s weather.

The researchers found that the weather was not generally on the minds of most overseas visitors, with only 9% of the Trip-Advisor reviews mentioning it. European visitors were most likely to comment on hot weather.

Fitchett and her associates also examined tourist climate suitability in 10 cities in South Africa. They used the tourism climate index (TCI) to score these cities.

The TCI results confirmed “current excellent suitability of the climate for tourism” in South Africa. But they did find worrying reductions in the TCI scores for Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Kimberly.

The problem is that, in the near future, this climate suitability is likely to change radically. The latest IPCC report shows that human-induced warming is happening more rapidly in Africa than in the rest of the world.

Besides high winds, there will be heat waves and swings between droughts and flooding.

The Cape Town “day zero” drought in 2018 caused a 10% decline in tourism occupancy.

By the turn of the century, it’s predicted that sea levels could rise by around half to one metre, or by as much as two to five metres. The report stressed that ice-sheet melt was still poorly understood and was difficult to model.

“We’re already experiencing climate change, including more frequent and more extreme weather events,” IPCC author Prof Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading warned. “The consequences will continue to get worse for every bit of warming, and for many of these consequences, there’s no going back.”

Such increases in sea levels would destroy the tourist towns scattered along the South African coastline. “It’s so hard to get people to wrap their heads around that all of this is caused by climate change. Many are working on an ad hoc, day-to-day basis,” says Dr Julia Giddy, a lecturer in geography at the University of Mpumalanga who has been studying the effects that extreme weather events have on adventure tourism.

The current concern, she says, is the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Another problem is that the tourism industry is so disjointed. It’s not like there’s a bunch of people trying to work together. Everybody’s working on their own,” said Giddy.

In a future of extreme weather brought on by climate change, what could also wipe out local tourism is the speed at which information travels.

This was demonstrated in late 2019 when reports emerged that Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe had dried up “because of climate change”.

Reputable news organisations carried the story. But it was false news.

“There was this specific shot of the cliff face where there is no water at that time of year and it went viral. And there was a reduction in bookings and huge repercussions for the tourism sector,” says Fitchett.

There are ways of combating the effects of climate change, Fitchett points out.

Some measures to save water are as simple as installing low-flow taps and covers for swimming pools. Heat stress can be dealt with by using air conditioning and fans.

More long-term measures include increasing vegetation density in urban settings and introducing heat-sensitive building designs.

To address rising sea levels, dolloses – reinforced concrete blocks – can be placed along shorelines.

The problem, however, is a lack of data.

Soon Giddy might be part of a multidisciplinary team of researchers that will be examining the possible effect of climate change on the Kruger National Park and the surrounding Canyons Biosphere Region.

The location of game sightings has changed in the national park, she says. It could be linked to climate change and could have an impact on tourism. But no one knows for sure.

Giddy also studied and wrote an academic paper on the cancelled Cape Town Cycle Tour in 2017.

What she found was a hint of what extreme weather will do to such events in the future: in the year after the wind, the Cape Town Cycle Tour didn’t get sold out – for the first time ever. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.