Southern Africa is a water stress hot spot, which under climate change is projected to become drastically warmer, and likely also drier, but with more extreme rainfall events in the east. WaRisCo will explore two of the biggest disaster risks South Africa may face in a warmer world:
1) the risk of an unprecedented long-duration ‘day-zero drought’ in its Gauteng Province, an event with potentially disastrous socio-economic and environmental impacts, and
2) the risk of mega-flooding in the rivers of the larger Durban region – such floods may be catastrophic in terms of the number of human lives lost.
A comprehensive hydrological modelling system integrating state-of-the art regional climate models and explorative scenarios of land-use, land-management and land-cover change (LUMCC) will be developed. The project aims at obtaining probabilistic projections of how climate change and LUMCC may alter water security in the Integrated Vaal River System and the KwaZulu-Natal River Systems for the very first time. Working with key stakeholders, including the national Department of Water and Sanitation, and the National Disaster Management Centre, WaRisCo will support Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation strategies in both the Gauteng Province and the Durban region. Specifically, WaRisCo will generate research outputs directly relevant to climate-smart DRR and long-term adaptation, and will strive for the uptake of these hydro-climate services in DRR and long-term adaptation, through a co-design process with key stakeholders who have the authority and mandate to implement the project’s recommendations. Our research methodology and implementation strategy will be designed to be transferable to other catchments in southern Africa and beyond.
Project Partners:
- Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU), Department of Gepgraphy, Geographic Information Science
- University of the Witwatersrand, Global Change Institute (Wits-GCI)
- Helmholtz Centre Hereon, Climate Service Center Germany (Hereon-GERICS)
- SYDRO Consult GmbH (SYDRO)
- Motlole and Associates (MA)
- Agricultural Research Council (ARC)
