Skip to main content

Flood risks in Johannesburg




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 there, connected with the local community in especially the Vhembe region and have seen some of the difficulties in dealing with water in real life in that region, I will start to focus on South Africa in my blog. In this blog post, I will write about climate change-related water problems and climate justice in Johannesburg. In my coming two blog posts I will focus on respectively the Vhembe region and Cape Town.

Geographically Johannesburg does not seem like a very vulnerable place for the effects of climate change. The city is located on the interior highveld plateau of South Africa. It is relatively far located from the sea and is situated at an altitude of 1740 m (Vogel & Fatti, 2010). However, when you take a closer look, Johannesburg is indeed at risk. Urban flooding already occurs frequently in the city and flood risk as a result of heavy precipitations events are projected to be heavier and more frequent. The stormwater risks are Johannesburg's biggest risk, related to climate change (Hetz, 2015). Research on rainfall and storms in Johannesburg between 1960-2009 indicates a decrease in both thunderstorms and total rainfall, however, the average amount of rainfall per storm increased, resulting in more floods in Johannesburg (Figure 1) (Vogel & Fatti, 2010). Health risks associated with heavy precipitation events are "increased risk of injury, death, as well as infectious respiratory and skin diseases" (Archer et al., 2016). 

Figure 1: Average rainfall from thunderstorms in Johannesburg.
Source: Vogel & Fatti, 2010

In Johannesburg it is not only climate change that put parts of the city in danger. Developmental shortcomings, like inequality and poverty, cause great disparities in climate-related risks and vulnerability among different groups and places (Hetz, 2015). Climate justice is, besides the unequal distribution of environmental goods and bads, also about this uneven development process (Fisher, 2014).  The effects of the floods especially put threats on the health and life of urban populations of marginalized areas (Hetz, 2015). This is partly because of weak urban planning and management in times of urbanizations in African cities and in this case Johannesburg. Week panning together with fast population growth and poverty gives rise to informal settlements. These informal settlements, often in townships, deal with water management problems because of the lack of drainage.  On top of this, is the stormwater often contaminated with greywater (Adegun, 2015).  In addition, these informal settlements are often located nearby streams and rivers that are high risks for flooding during storm events. Picture 1 shows a flood risk map of Johannesburg in 2016. On the map, I have put black circles on places in the City of Johannesburg region with a lot of informal housing (Harrison et al, 2014). As you can see, especially around Soweto but also at the top of the map in township Diepsloot, where a lot of informal housing is located the flood risk is high. An increase in heavy rainfall will put more pressure on a blocked drain and, areas without drainage. Marginalized communities living in poorly constructed informal housing and nearby the water will be at risk (Archer et al., 2016). 
Picture 1: Flood maps Johannesburg
Source: The South African National Space Agence (2016)Access: http://products.sansa.org.za/mapApp/SANSA.html



                                     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Eastern African Paradox

The Eastern African Paradox  My first associations with Africa and Climate change are often images of severe droughts, water shortages, and floods. Although floods are part of this image, I thought of Africa as getting dryer with just occasional extreme weather events such as heavy precipitation. This course together with my other course, global environmental change, has opened my eyes. I was very surprised when finding out that climate change models project the eastern part of Africa to get wetter, instead of getting a dryer climate. Droughts are ravaging countries in the East African region as long rains in the wet season failed, bringing, among other humanitarian issues, a food crisis.  Although models predict the region to get wetter, both local weather data and dry streams show otherwise (Del Bello, 2017). This blogpost will consider this contradiction, the so-called Eastern African paradox. Figure 1: Worldwide precipitation prediction IPCC, 2017 Ob...
Post a Comment
Read more

The End

Last blogpost The last couple of months I’ve used this blog the learn about Environmental Change in Africa. I started with a country I was kind of familiar with to introduce myself to the subject. After some blogpost about South Africa, I moved to the eastern part of Africa. There, my focus moved from a focus on climate (in)justice and vulnerability to the climate change – violent conflict nexus. This seemed interesting to me because violent conflict often holds development back. After two blogposts about this, and reading a bit about climate change in eastern Africa, I wanted to know more about this topic. After reading a lot about climate projections predicting less water in South Africa, I now read about predictions on increasing amounts of precipitation. Therefore, my curiosity was aroused and I wrote a blogpost on the Eastern African Paradox. After those three blog posts, I wanted to go back to my initial focus on vulnerability and injustice. Therefore my last to blog posts ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Climate Change Adaptation in Mozambique

I ended my last blog post by saying that in adaptation to climate change the context should always be considered and the vulnerabilities of the populations and the specific region should be understood. In this blog post, I will highlight a couple cases, in which the context, the local climate, and communities are shown to be important in adaptation. Whether climate change adaptation is a success has to do a lot with the perception of local communities and the sensitivity of institutions instead of just the right technologies and funding. Everyday practices are often institutional, social and cultural patterns that should be considered in adaptation policies (Artur & Hilhorst, 2007) .  To maintain livelihoods in a lot of places, adaptation is crucial to increase resilience. People in Africa often depend on agriculture, water, forests, and other sectors sensitive to climate change. Especially for them, it is important to think about adaptation measures. This is according t...
Post a Comment
Read more