South Africa on the Brink of Global Warming Disaster - Report

A recent assessment by climatologists at the Global Change Institute (GCI) at the University of the Witwatersrand indicates an increasing likelihood that taps in Gauteng province are going to run dry sometime in the 2030s or the 2040s if global heating continues unabated, writes Ethan Van Diemen for Daily Maverick.

This comes after the release of the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report Six Working Group I report, which said climate change is widespread, rapid, intensifying and unprecedented - a 'code red' for humanity. Professor Francois Engelbrecht, Professor of Climatology at the Wits Global Change Institute and a lead author on the IPCC report, said: "I think that the single biggest risk we are facing because of climate change in the immediate future - by that I mean the next 10 years - is a Day Zero drought in Gauteng."

The phrase Day Zero relates to the Cape Town water crisis during a period of severe water shortage in the Western Cape region which peaked between mid-2017 to mid-2018 when water levels hovered between 15 and 30% of total dam capacity, a scenario that may reoccur. The IPCC has previously identified the 1.5°C global average temperature increase as a tipping point in the climate crisis. It says that, after reaching this tipping point, we can expect "warming of extreme temperatures ... frequency, intensity and/or amount of heavy precipitation ... and an increase in intensity or frequency of droughts".