Now, nobody has money to spend here,” she said. What it means is that the 2017 drought was at least as rare as once in 36 years. Agri Wes-Cape has warned many farmers have started planting winter crops but rains have arrived too late. This study investigated and analysed the preparedness, impact of and response by the farming community to the 2007/2008 drought using the Eastern Cape … Acknowledgements to SAWS and DWS for data, and Chris Jack and Stefaan Conradie (both CSAG/UCT) for valuable discussions. The environmental palette contains only dull greys, browns and reds. We know that before that there were droughts in the 1920s and 1970s. We need to repeat the analyses on the entire SAWS dataset. Perhaps if we had a different set of observations we would get a different result? How can I kick my abusive ex out of our house? “In our prayer group, we already lost three farmers in a very short time. : this interesting and important new study on the role of climate change in the drought ; and this CSIR report on the Knysna fires of 2017 ). The change in risk of a drought like the one just experienced in Cape Town that is attributable to human influence on climate. Indicators for vulnerability and coping capacity are traditionally categorized as … The knock-on effects of the drought on the dorpies of the Northern Cape has been devastating, with some reduced to virtual ghost towns: Abandoned shops on the main street of places like Fraserburg tell another story about the drought’s impact on this province. Where vanishingly rare patches of green grass are to be found, animals cluster, ribs protruding through emaciated bellies. A more detailed version of this analysis has been published. One factor should be obvious: population growth. This is far beyond a disaster.” Sutherland resident Sybil Visagie doesn’t mince her words. A bed and breakfast owner in Sutherland, who also runs a restaurant, had a similar account. Home Affairs won't issue a birth certificate for my daughter because she was born in Lesotho. Mini-thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Masters in Development and Management at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North-West University . The environmental palette contains only dull greys, browns and reds. The drought conditions were having profound negative implications on the economies of the affected provinces, with a subsequent impact on the economy of rest of the country. That trend is towards lower rainfall and it has a relatively strong magnitude – 17mm per ten years. Year Population Growth(%) Growth2030 4,322,000 5.65% 231,0002025 4,091,000 5.98% 231,0002020 3,860,000 2.22% 84,0002018 3,776,000 3.17% 116,0002015 3,660,000 9.42% 315,0002010 3,345,000 10.54% 319,0002005 3,026,000 11.45% 311,0002000 2,715,000 13.41% 321,0001995 2,394,000 11.09% 239,0001990 2,155,000 11.95% 230,000. Soweto learners protest state’s failure to fix school. The causes of Cape Town’s water crisis are hotly contested. This was the end of the 'great drought' experienced in Cape Town, from 1928-1933. IPC; Posted 2 Feb 2021 The drought has ruined our whole economy.”. When it rained for a few hours during the first week of January 2020, there were reports that some young children of the Northern Cape experienced raindrops for the first time in their lives. Visagie’s brainchild was Save the Sheep, which has seen the women of Sutherland’s farming community come together to crochet sheep to sell to raise both money and awareness. If you don't see any interesting for you, use our search form on bottom ↓ . You can only truly understand the effects of the Northern Cape’s eight-year drought by seeing the landscape for yourself. The data shows that the drought over the water catchment area is the worst on record over one- and three-year periods. Some, it was said, had gone overseas to try their luck at farming elsewhere. She can’t afford to. This is what eight years of drought looks like. Then, a long period of trying to recover. Priya Reddy: From a City of Cape Town political leadership point of view, and as per the Council resolution taken on Friday 19 January 2018, the Executive Deputy Mayor, Alderman Ian Neilson, who is a professional hydrological engineer by trade with a Master’s degree in engineering; and the Mayoral Committee Member for Informal Settlements, Water and Waste Services; and Energy, … There are many great benefits to being a Maverick Insider. Revenue from the project also goes towards supporting farmworkers’ families. Or is it totally random? That came on the back of an already devastating drought, now in its eighth year. Is it true that it is currently suffering from the worst drought since 1904? You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. On this page you can read or download data collection on drought in PDF format. +27 (0) 21 788 9163 We seldom work in our office during the Covid-19 pandemic and this phone is not usually answered. Agri-Northern Cape (Agri-NC) says it is looking forward to the help it will receive from the government to raise almost R688m for drought aid in the province. So when do semantics inform science? Can we forecast rain for 2018? The Northern Cape has experienced severe drought. When. African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa Herds will have to be built up. Similarly to the above analysis, I plot below the mean rainfall for the three stations: The figures show that 2017 was the lowest rainfall year since 1933. Almost 14,000 jobs are at stake. The country remained wracked by drought with the three Cape provinces affected - the Western Cape, Northern Cape, and the Eastern Cape. Cape Town dams have passed the 90% mark for the first time this year as consistent rain helps to replenish the city’s water supply. Last year, the Northern Cape region clocked its lowest average recorded rainfall since 1933. Rainfall in 2017 was especially poor. My ex and I registered for an RDP house together. Around R300-million was promised in emergency funds from the Department of Water and Sanitation, with the funding destined for interventions, which include digging boreholes and providing drinking water. “It seems as if [government] has no comprehension of the scale of the crisis,” Agri-Northern Cape deputy president Willem Symington told Daily Maverick. It would surely have been far more helpful to have data from 1928. Eton College once provided free education to poor boys. It is estimated that the value of production during a normal situation in the affected area would amount to R2.53 billion per annum. were used to analyze drought hazard probability and severity for each of the tertiary catchments in the province. “With the backwards and forward linkages to the rest of the economy, [Northern Cape agriculture] is responsible for 22,437 equivalent jobs throughout the economy,” the report noted. There is a drought, of course. Next:  The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape will be increasing pressure on provincial government to implement a 10-year drought support and climate change mitigation plan in the Northern Cape. Secondly, lack of natural grazing makes it necessary to buy fodder and feed for animals at great cost. Wouldn't it be better to say, 'this is an average 12 year drought, maybe slightly worse than usual, but we can't say if it's really worse than the 1928 drought?'. Not all stations in this dataset have good records; there are numerous gaps. info@groundup.org.za, Suite 08SB, 1st floorSouth  mismanagement behind a mild drought. Further analysis on the performance of the crop under various drought conditions revealed that WRSI values corresponding to more intense drought conditions were detected during the December planting date for all stations. Are these significant contributors to the shortage? “You see these big, strong farmers just crying as they receive their parcels,” one Sutherland local told, A range of initiatives has been born from the need to generate funds for drought relief. Visagie’s brainchild was. The Northern Cape government has granted R30 million to drought relief. I trust the lessons learnt in Perth can be applied to Cape Town. Please sign in or register to enable this feature. And to account for the fact that the drought is likely of a multi-year character, I created plots showing two-, three- and four-year average rainfall: These plots tell a consistent story: 2017, as well as the preceding two-, three- and four-year average rainfall in the region are the lowest since 1981. Thank you for publishing this, but I note that a lot of the data begins in 1933. Since 2014, this area has experienced almost no rainfall. If it has been severe, then it has just been a bad ticket on the climate lottery, and all the other factors would be at most aggravating factors but not the main cause. What should I do now that the five-year ban in my passport has expired? Further assistance has been pledged from other government ministries, including the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. I come from Perth, a city of 1.6 million on the south western tip of Australia - with a climate almost identical to Cape Town. We need to compare the current drought to the old ones. Only three are located in the WCWSS dam region: Vrugbaar, Rustfontein and Nuweberg. Interestingly, if you look at the long-term rainfall data for the stations located near the coast, the situation is slightly different: Here, although relatively bad, 2017 was not – either alone or in combination with preceding years — the driest on record. The issue is obviously socially tense, creating wedges between authorities and citizens, between those who institute water restrictions and those who have to bear the brunt of them. We can even go back further in time to 1920, but then we can rely on one station only (Vrugbaar). The statistical analysis I have done to calculate this are explained in my more detailed blog version of this article. However, the trend explains very little of the overall variance in data. Some farmers’ associations have organised “resilience workshops” for farmers and farmworkers in order to teach mental coping strategies. If the drought has been mild, then it should not have resulted in a major water crisis. 21 Belmont RoadRondebosch “The Eastern Cape is in a serious drought situation. Take a finite resource and distribute it to twice as many people without efforts to increase that finite resource and you might, just might find yourself in a world of hurt. Those who stick it out have taken tremendous strain. In the area around Sutherland, Daily Maverick heard stories of farmers simply abandoning their farms. But that appear to be not the case. In this particular case we suspect that it is anthropogenic climate change, so it is not likely that the trend will get reversed in the next couple of years. Analysis: A drought of nature compounded by a drought in leadership. The Western Cape province in South Africa experienced overall below average rainfall over the period 2015–2017. But how rare exactly? Gratitude is reserved mainly for the teams from Gift of the Givers, the aid organisation which has been providing relief in the form of drinking water and boreholes to drought-stricken areas all over the country. 68. Also, because at the time of writing this, data are available only till October 2017. What can we do? “Nobody has money. It's a few percentage points at most. However, the two-year mean as well as the four-year mean leading to 2017, were not the driest. ... Stock Quotes, and Market Data and Analysis. “It’s the drought,” she responded in Afrikaans when asked by. It is not just farmers and farmworkers taking the hit. But data from other sources do. Quantitative and qualitative farm level data was also obtained through structured questionnaires distributed to individual commercial farmers through the network of Northern Cape Agri. Drought risk is a function of hazard, vulnerability, and coping capacity. heard stories of farmers simply abandoning their farms. It is feared that, unless it rains very soon, the drinking water supply in Cape town will be seriously threatened. The worst-hit part of the province is the southern area, which encompasses towns like Calvinia, Williston, Fraserburg and Sutherland. for continuity and consistency of record), we get five stations with data covering the period 1933 to 2017. Drought is a major disaster in South Africa in terms of total economic loss and number of people affected. Now I have a more comprehensive dataset, which provides an opportunity to perform a more robust assessment. As a result of this hollowing-out of the local economy, employment has been shed in sectors like hospitality and tourism as well as agriculture. Some areas are worse than others as can be seen that some dams are dangerously low while others are full,” said Lucas. When we talk about a drought there are two key parameters measuring its severity. Firstly, analysis of SPI-3, SPI-6 and SPI-12 illustrate that between 1985 and 2016, the Western Cape Province experienced recurrent mild drought conditions. There’s nothing.”. Putting the end of the year in October allows me to use the 2017 data without estimating rainfall in November and December. This, however, has not been granted yet. Debts have to be paid back.”, For now, it is not uncommon for Northern Cape locals to part ways not with “goodbye”, but with “sterkte” (strength). The drought in the city itself is severe, but not the worst on record. Dr Wolski is a researcher with UCT’s Climate System Analysis Group. Revenue from the project also goes towards supporting farmworkers’ families. See copyright notice on articles for terms. Perhaps there are errors in data? With the ANC’s top brass gathered in Kimberley for the party’s 108th birthday celebration a few days later, the province was finally declared a disaster area. Now it quite literally does the opposite. As a result, 15 000 farmers have been affected. I think this dataset is robust. But this is not the area where most of our water is supplied from. Piotr Wolski, a water scientist at UCT, has used the latest rainfall and best available weather station data to compare the current drought to past ones. This has important implications. This is how plots for this station look: Again, the 2017 rainfall for that station, and importantly the mean of 3-years prior to 2017 were lower than in any period experienced by this station since 1920. Originally, our city relied 100% on rainfall flowing into our dams. Given the high price of these products, coupled with a fall of 30% in the farm price of red meat in 2019, it is an unsustainable situation.”. The researcher has thus omitted the most important 'drought' period, except for one data set. But it is within farming that jobs are most precarious. The severe 3-year “Day Zero” drought that threatened Cape Town’s water supply is often referred to as the “Western Cape drought” or the “Cape Town drought“. My findings are that this kind of drought occurs once in 311 years with a 90% confidence that it falls between 105 and 1,280 years. Does it make sense to use the average of several stations in the analysis? Supervisor: Dr LD Nemakonde Download data collection on drought document. From the road, one sees the bones of beasts who have succumbed to thirst, or hunger picked dry. With the ANC’s top brass gathered in Kimberley for the party’s 108. birthday celebration a few days later, the province was finally declared a disaster area. So any prediction based on the trend will not be very accurate. If available SAWS data are screened in a similar manner as the DWS data were (i.e. APDUSA. 1732 days ago Eight provinces declared disaster areas due to drought I have tried to answer that question before. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Using the CRU observations and the CORDEX data as input for the SPI/SPEI drought algorithms in R statistical software (Vicente‐Serrano et al., 2010; Beguería and Vicente‐Serrano, 2013), 12 month drought indices (ending in March, which is the end of the rainfall season in the Western Cape… DM. So the long-term SAWS data from the WCWSS dams region shows that 2017 and the period 2015 to 2017 were the driest since 1933. “Drought can only end with rain,” says Symington. Daily precipitation and temperature data of the 11 quaternary catchments were obtained from QCD_DAT.EXE, a self-extracting compressed data file containing 50 years (1950–1999) of daily hydroclimatic data pertaining to each of the 1946 quaternary catchments of South Africa . Importantly, the analyses reveal that the drought was likely less severe in the coastal plains and in Cape Town itself. 1.2 Types of drought There are a number of stations that measure rainfall in the vicinity of the Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS) dams. Just a couple of questions from this layman: Can one forecast on past trends and on the data available (a) what the likelihood is of above average rainfall in the WC in 2018 and (b) if heavy rain is likely, from the monthly data how early in the year these heavy rains may fall following a three-year lower than average rainfall? Using averages of several stations reduces the chance that data errors affect the result. No green. It is also difficult to pinpoint exactly when the national drought began, as some areas had experienced below-average rainfall since 2014 (Drought SA 2016). If Cape Town is experiencing a similar trend then this would mean a total change to where you get your water. Block, Tannery Park Of course, one may question that result in many ways. A range of initiatives has been born from the need to generate funds for drought relief. Visagie, who is active in a number of drought relief activities, carried out a survey in 2019, which found that between 40% and 90% of farmworkers had lost their jobs in certain areas. “[Livestock] herds have been drastically reduced to about 50% of normal [size]. “Farmers are packing up,” confirmed Visagie. At this stage, we have a relatively good understanding of what atmospheric processes and factors affect the onset and magnitude of rains in the winter rainfall region, but a very limited ability to forecast them. We now only get 10% of the stream flow that was flowing into the dams for the first 70 years of last century. But how rare exactly? But facts are few, opinions plenty. Are the stations used representative? “Previously, at least the farmers’ wives would stop in for a coffee. “It’s the drought,” she responded in Afrikaans when asked by Daily Maverick why things were so quiet. The rainfall data from the South African Weather Service (SAWS) for some stations in the Western Cape go as far back as the late 1800s. Revised data on drought crisis still not very useful, https://www.watercorporation.com.au/water-supply/rainfall-and-dams/streamflow/streamflowhistorical, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, Home Affairs bureaucracy: Woman can’t get an ID or register her child’s birth, Historic pub faces eviction by South African army, say owners, School principal charged with attempted murder after pit toilet incident, Over 5,000 Eastern Cape health workers will be without jobs at the end of this month, “I gave up when they told me that I wouldn’t be able to write matric without an ID book”.