TRD: GLOBAL WARMING AND AGRICULTURE
- An action plan for the Western Cape
- Tackling the challenges - an agricultural response
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“Climate change will have lasting consequences. In facing up to man-made climate change, human beings are going to have to think in terms of decades and centuries. The job is just beginning – many of the effects of climate shifts will not be apparent for two or three generations. In the future, everyone may be hearing about and living with this problem (Understanding climate change – a beginner’s guide to the UN Framework Convention and its Kyoto Protocol)”
With the above-mentioned as a setting-the-scene-scenario, the Department of Agriculture Western Cape has aligned itself, especially with regard to water management and resource utilisation strategies, to keep abreast of the challenges of climate change and its effects on agriculture in the Western Cape. To overcome these effects, adaptation and mitigation plans will be pivotal to the agricultural sector and a concerted and well-orchestrated strategic framework and action plan will have to be developed and implemented to its fullest extent.
But what can we expect in the Western Cape – will we feel climate change? According to one of the experts on climate change in the Western Cape, Dr. Guy Midgley of the SA National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), our province and in particular the agricultural sector and its people, will experience the following:
- An increase in the frequency and intensity of extremes – droughts and floods
- Lower rainfall in all the seasons in the south-western part of the Province
- A shorter winter rainfall season
- A temperature increase from the south-west to the north-east of the Province
- Higher temperatures in the spring and summer months
- An expected 1 degree increase in temperature in the late 2030’s
- An increase in wind in all the seasons, but especially in winter – coastal regions will be more affected
- Conditions favourable to fires will prevail
- An increase in evapotranspiration – a decrease in soil moisture and a decrease in water availability – this will result in crop stress
- Cold units will decrease
- Heat units will increase
- Agro-climatic sones will shift
- More heat stress during the hottest days
- Increase in hail and hail in areas where it was formerly not a phenomenon
Continue to An action plan for the Western Cape.
