Water, Development and Climate Change in Africa

Cape Town  My second blog post about environmental change and environmental justice in South-Africa will be about Cape Town. Looking at figure 1, there has been a clear difference in rainfall between Johannesburg and Cape Town over the last years. Although Cape Town, just like Johannesburg, does deal with floods. This blog post will be about the lack of water in Cape Town. Cape Town, the second-largest city in South-Africa is located in the Mediterranean climate zone ( Muller, 2018 ). In winter months (June-August) the city experiences a mild to moderately wet winter with temperatures from 8 to 18 degrees. In the summer months (December-March) it deals with warm dry summer with temperature ranges from 16 to 26 degrees. Cold front norther westerly winds bring in most of the annual precipitation which is annual approximately 515 mm a year ( Abiodun et al., 2017 ). Cape Town has been dealing with droughts for decades. The last severe drought period was last year. Climate model...

Flood risks in Johannesburg                                       Juksei river alongside informal settlements in Johannesburg, 2016                                                                  source: Groundup   January this year I went to South Africa, with a group of students from the University of Amsterdam, to do research together with students from the University of Venda. The main goal of the course was obtaining abroad research experience, with a focus on the ethics of researching abroad in and together with other cultures. The subject of the research was food security in the Vhembe region. This already fueled my interest in, besides food security, both water, and development in Africa. Since I have been...

Hi, my name is Anniek and I am currently an affiliate student at UCL. This blog is part of the module “Water and Development in Africa”. The relationship between water and environmental change is central to my blog. This first blog post will mostly be an introduction to this subject. I will begin by explaining the concepts of environmental justice and climate justice. This will be followed by highlighting climate injustice between the global north and the global south. After this, I will introduce environmental (in)justice in Africa, as a result of climate change, which will be the starting point for the rest of my blog. Who pays the price? This week is a week full of Extinction Rebellion protests, a protest group rebelling for a better world. For the last couple of months, there have been plenty of marches and protests by students and schoolchildren. The most shared vision of Extinction Rebellion and other protest groups are “creating a world that is fit for generations to com...