Climate related disasters are causing widespread damage as winter approaches

Droughts, floods, wildfires, high winds, and very unusual weather patterns are emerging more frequently, and are becoming more extreme, causing billions of rands of damage to infrastructure, and loss of people’s homes, lives and livelihoods.

According to Oxfam International “we are currently witnessing a scale of destruction and devastation that is new and terrifying,” which they attribute to climate change. Oxfam warns that the number of climate-related disasters has tripled over the past 30 years, and more than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes because of climate change.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that adapting to climate change and coping with damages will cost developing countries between $140–300bn per year by 2030.

In the past week, South Africa’s coastal provinces were brutally ravaged by floods, which authorities say will cost billions to repair.
Nelson Mandela Bay and Buffalo City in the Eastern Cape, and various low-lying communities across KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape all experienced heavy rains, causing severe damage to roads and bridges, and demolished people’s homes, forcing them to be displaced and take temporary shelter in community halls, EDC centres, and churches.

Disaster management authorities across the affected municipalities have approached FoodForward SA to assist communities with food, while displaced people are living in the temporary structures. We responded immediately by collaborating with our local beneficiary organisations on the ground, providing them with food to prepare nutritious cooked meals daily, as well as healthy snacks and fruit. We are currently responding in the following communities:

• In Nelson Mandela Bay we are providing meals to 1,800 people every day, spread across five community halls
  
• In Buffalo City in East London we are providing meals to 500 people every day in nine community halls
  
• In KZN we are providing daily meals to 2,500 people spread across six community halls

Because of the extent of the damage and displacement, we extended a public call to action to our food and financial donors for support, and the response has been overwhelming. We have received a range of perishable and non-perishable food groceries which we have dispatched to the affected communities, and we will continue to provide cooked meals until victims of the floods have rebuilt their structures and moved out of the community halls.

Special thanks to Lactalis, RCL, Mondelez, Qutom Farms, Tiger Brands, Pepsico, Premier Foods, Iceman Water, POSA, OneFarm Share, Family Butchery in KZN, and Nedbank Foundation for responding to our call in such a generous manner, demonstrating solidarity during a very difficult time.

While responding to immediate climate-related disasters is critical, unless we speedily adopt mitigation and adaption strategies to significantly reduce methane emissions, to keep global temperatures from rising above the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, we will see even further increases in climate events that are more and more destructive, and the cost of recovery may become far greater than our ability to do so.

While no one is immune to climate change, those living in poor communities, who are the hardest hit by climate disasters, causes them to fall deeper into the sinkhole of poverty and food insecurity.

One mitigation strategy, which FoodForward SA implements along with several partners across the food system, is timeously identifying and diverting good quality, nutritious surplus food away from landfills, and redirecting it towards vulnerable communities affected by food insecurity - thereby addressing two significant challenges at once. For success to be achieved in this area, accelerated collective action is needed now.