OPINION ISS TODAY PIECE
Is climate change to blame for KwaZulu-Natal’s flood damage? With every second city and town projected to suffer increased flooding, South Africa must be better prepared. 12 May 2022. By Prof Francois Engelbrecht, Director, Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand; Alize le Roux, Senior Researcher, ISS; Prof Coleen Vogel, Distinguished Professor of Sustainability, Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and Aimeé-Noël Mbiyozo, Senior Researcher, ISS. Republished from https://issafrica. org/iss-today/is-climate-change-to-blame-for-kwazulu-natals-flood-damage?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_ campaign=ISS_Today&utm_medium=email.
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month ago, floods in the country’s eastern KwaZuluNatal province killed 489 people, destroyed 4,000 houses and displaced about 40,000 residents. Flooding started when a cut-off low-pressure system delivered extremely high rainfall levels of 450 mm in some areas in just 48 hours. Many have called it South Africa’s deadliest storm on record, and the country’s leaders have blamed climate change for the widespread devastation. But is that accurate? Flooding is a frequent, annual and well-known hazard in South Africa. Cut-off low-pressure systems have caused comparable events before, including in
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SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA MAY 2022
KwaZulu-Natal. A remarkably similar system was responsible for the infamous September 1987 floods in the province that killed 506 people after 900 mm of rain were recorded over four days. In April 2019, another cut-off low-pressure system
brought 170 mm of rain to the Durban area (Chart 1). About 80 people died in the resulting mud slides and flash floods. A similar system caused the 1981 Laingsburg flood in the Western Cape. It killed 104 people when the Buffalo River
Chart 1: Similar weather systems caused severe flooding in the Durban area in (a) September 1987, (b) April 2019 and (c) April 2022.
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