Environmental activist at watershed of change

JULIE LEIBOWITZ

He told the Greenside Shul community last weekend that every year, humans use more resources than are generated. Population growth and a drying continent requires innovative solutions and technology, but most of all it requires regional co-operation.

At the shul’s special Tu B’Shvat Shabbos gathering, Collins spoke about the efforts by governments and communities to adapt to the impact of climate change in southern Africa.

Collins is a skilled facilitator, who brings parties together to solve environmental problems. He helped mediate between parties during the KwaZulu-Natal violence in the 1980s. He also mediated between mining companies and communities in the St Lucia estuary. He’s now working on a programme called Resilient Waters, which brings parties together across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to find solutions to water shortages, floods, agriculture, and conservation.

He says South Africa currently has a population of 56.7 million people, and that by 2050 this is expected to rise to 75 million. Everyone will need food and water, and there just isn’t enough water in the system.

He points out that a farmer needs 880mm of rain a year to survive agriculturally without the help of additional water technology. But ultimately, the impact of climate change isn’t less water, it’s that it will come in big dashes.

Collins went on to alert the community to the fact that gases such as methane from livestock, landfills, and sulphur dioxide are warming the earth. The ocean is heating up, and sea levels are rising. Fertilisers, pesticides, and land-use change are creating massive extinction, leading to an imperative to allocate more land for conservation and biodiversity. South Africa, in particular, has one of the highest carbon footprints in the world.

He points out that the continent has invested massively in hydro power, but questions how this will be impacted by drought. In Malawi, the problem has been exacerbated by the widescale felling of trees for charcoal, resulting in massive water runoff.

Collins talks about a “food-energy-water nexus”, by which he means that environmental crisis forces us to see the interconnections.

However, he says he is encouraged by the level of regional co-operation and environmentally conscious decisions taken by SADC and its communities, though he says lack of sharing, cost constraints, and difficulty with change are still challenges.

“Maybe apartheid did us a small favour in creating the so-called frontline states, which then became SADC,” he said. “It has some of the most progressive environmental policies in the world.”

SADC is helping Africa to resist colonial boundaries through organisations like Okacom (the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission) which is an agreement between Angola, Namibia and Botswana to co-operate to protect the Cubango-Okavango River Basin.

South Africa, which has many different biomes from desert to tropical, has a climate-adaptation strategy in place, he says. The concern is that a lot of the Cape-based biomes won’t survive as they are sensitive to the water cycle.

There is greater recognition of water towers and eco-system services (for example cleaning water systems using reeds, rather than chemicals – even in private swimming pools), and the Waterberg, Soutpansberg, and Groot Marico have been declared significant environmental zones.

Collins outlined three main approaches to the crisis we face: mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

Mitigation, he says, involves moving away from the use of fossil fuels, fertiliser, and plastics to ecologically sound alternatives like solar energy.

He gave the example of the profusion of water hyacinth in the Hartbeespoort Dam in North West Province as a result of the fertiliser runoff from farms upstream. Likewise, he says, landfills are a huge problem because they release methane into the atmosphere. There is a ground-breaking experiment taking place to use black soldier flies to compost waste.

Another way to mitigate damage is through taxes and, he says South Africa last year signed a carbon tax on greenhouse gases into law.

Adaptation means finding ways to use less water. In South Africa, 80% of our water is used for agriculture.

Israel has been successful in growing food through drip irrigation, hydroponics, greenhouses, the use of fish and plants in same water system, and by placing crop residues on the soil to improve soil structure.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from shock. For example, he says, Kenya’s wheat fields were destroyed by too much rain over the past two years, and there has been large-scale destruction of wildlife as a result of drought, leading to conflict between humans and wildlife. Hence, experts are looking carefully at where to dig waterholes – including for elephants – and where to plant.

Resilience is also about knowing who your friends are. Digital networks help to share information and resources in times of disaster.

In conclusion, Collins says we need to transition from a carbon-based energy system which guzzles large amounts of water. We need to find ways to deal with droughts and floods, we need to invest in biodiversity, and we need greater regional co-operation to make it happen.