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Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 28 June 2011
With climate change now widely recognised as the major environmental problem facing the world, the South African government is taking awareness to schools with plans to incorporate more environmental studies into the school curricula.
 South Africa's population is increasing at a steady rate while water levels remain the same Projects to curb climate change are also being designed and will be made available to all schools across the country, according to Basic Education Deputy Minister Enver Surty. He said officials were working on making sure that environment awareness formed part of and was central to all school curricula.
“We all know by now that we have a problem of climate change and everybody is talking about it so we are using all platforms to redirect the attention of our young people to the importance of conserving the environment and making sure that we mitigate the impacts of the problem,” Surty said at the third annual Youth Water Summit organised by the Water Affairs Department on Tuesday.
With South Africa hosting the 17th UN Congress of Parties (COP 17) on climate change in a few months time, the Water Summit, which started last week, gave the floor to young citizens from all nine provinces and several SADC countries to share and discuss water and the need to save the environment. They all agreed that it was up to them to reverse the damage caused by global warming to the climate and committed to save the world for future generations.
Water Affairs Deputy Minister Rejoice Mabudafhasi conceded that water shortages and climate change were among the greatest challenges to South Africa’s development. Continue reading Environmental awareness to be central to all school curricula
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 22 June 2011
A delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, represented the “very best capacity” in the country, the government said on Friday.
 NGO GroundWork criticised the inclusion of Sasol and Eskom in the UN Climate Change Conference It was reacting to criticism – levelled earlier this week by the NGO GroundWork – about the inclusion of representatives from petrochemicals giant Sasol and electricity utility Eskom in the delegation.
In a statement on Wednesday, GroundWork said the inclusion of Sasol and Eskom representatives “simply boggles the mind”.
“How can the two companies, who together account for the majority of South Africa’s emissions, and who do so profitably, be tasked with charting a low-carbon future for the country?”
The environment affairs department defended the composition of government’s negotiating team.
“The policy governing the composition of the South African delegation for all UN climate change meetings and conferences of parties is constituted with representatives of government, business, civil society, labour and Salga (local government) representatives, and also includes representative with specific skills, particularly from the South African scientific community. Continue reading SA climate delegation justified
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 09 June 2011
Climate change will have major impacts on the availability of water for growing food and on crop productivity in the decades to come, warns a new FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] report.
 Loss of glaciers will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture ‘Climate Change, Water, and Food Security’ is a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture.
These include reductions in river runoff and aquifer recharges in the Mediterranean and the semi-arid areas of the Americas, Australia and southern Africa — regions that are already water-stressed. In Asia, large areas of irrigated land that rely on snowmelt and mountain glaciers for water will also be affected, while heavily populated river deltas are at risk from a combination of reduced water flows, increased salinity, and rising sea levels.
Additional impacts described in the report:
An acceleration of the world’s hydrological cycle is anticipated as rising temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from land and sea. Rainfall will increase in the tropics and higher latitudes, but decrease in already dry semi-arid to mid-arid latitudes and in the interior of large continents. A greater frequency in droughts and floods will need to be planned for but already, water scarce areas of the world are expected to become drier and hotter.
Even though estimates of groundwater recharge under climate change cannot be made with any certainty, the increasing frequency of drought can be expected to encourage further development of available groundwater to buffer the production risk for farmers. Continue reading Water warning for agriculture
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 30 May 2011
Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.
 Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.
Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.
“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”
Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said. Continue reading 2010 records highest carbon output in history
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 09 May 2011
Yet another scientific body has jumped in to the so-called Climategate fray to dispute that the leaked documents offer any reason to doubt that human activity is warming the planet.
 Evidence for human induced climate change continues to grow Back in 2009, as you may recall, a number of e-mails and documents related to climate research were leaked following a server breach at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Climate skeptics, poring through the correspondence, latched on to a number of emails that they claimed undermined the scientific case for human-caused climate change, including the widely publicized assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The climate scientists, skeptics alleged, manipulated data and used underhanded methods to block the publication of conflicting research.
But those skeptical claims have been roundly debunked. First, UEA asked two independent review panels to assess the evidence. Both reviews were completed in 2010 and found no evidence for scientific malpractice. The panels’ reports did make important recommendations about making climate science more transparent, but as the one of those reports concluded, “we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments.” The Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee in turn issued two reports on the UEA reviews, broadly accepting the panels’ recommendations for greater openness and transparency. Continue reading No reason to doubt that human activity is warming the planet
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