KwaZulu-Natal Floods: Poverty, Planning, and Climate Change
29 February - Devastating floods in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal are growing increasingly common in the region, costing lives and livelihoods. The province has experienced around 10 severe floods in the last 8 years, the most destructive of which (occurring in April 2022) leading to over 430 deaths and an estimated R17 billion required for infrastructure repairs. More recent storms in January 2024, which also affected the Free State province, affected over 6000 people and killed more than 40.
It is clear that action must be taken to limit the effects of these storms, but action must be preceded by knowledge of what has occurred, and why. Investigated here are three main factors contributing to these catastrophic floods within KwaZulu-Natal (KZN): poverty, poor planning, and climate change. Each of these causes is significant, and must be investigated in order to provide a comprehensive background to the province’s growing trend of natural disasters, as well as an explanation of what must be done to avert it.
Perhaps the most obvious cause of more frequent and destructive floods is climate change. As has been common knowledge for some time, humanity’s increased strain on the environment from the last century and a half of activity has adversely affected the environment - and this is a likely driver, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of severe storms and floods throughout the world. The World Weather Attribution’s study on the April 2022 floods confirmed the effects of climate change on the storms, and estimated that our effects on the environment contributed to a ~5% increase in storm severity.
However, while the effects of climate change are apparent, they do not adequately explain the magnitude of damage, to both humans and infrastructure. For comparison, Taiwanese floods in August 2013, which saw 650mm of rainfall in 24 hours (as opposed to KZN’s April 2022 levels of 450mm in 48 hours), resulted in only 3 deaths.
While some of the extreme variance of damage between Taiwan’s 2013 floods against KZN’s 2022 floods can potentially be explained by natural phenomena, a massive difference that should be explored is KZN’s comparatively poor critical infrastructural planning and implementation. The province has failed, in short, to provide adequate drainage systems in order to prevent overflow and flooding. South Africa’s Department of Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DPME) identified governance failures in infrastructure creation and management, as well as a lack of suitable spatial planning so as to prevent informal residences from being established in flood-prone areas as major contributors to the scale of the flood’s tragedy. Improvements to abate damages and casualties - such as stormwater drains or other flood resilience best practices; regulation of land usage; and ‘risk-informed urban planning’ - are recommended, but will only be possible given robust and efficient planning bodies. The inability of the South African government to implement these measures before the 2022 floods, given the early warning those storms which preceded it provided, does not provide hope for successful implementation in the future.
While poor planning and development schemes are certainly to blame for the severity of storms’ effects (and climate change for the storms’ severity), one focus of this broader issue is generally left unnoticed: that of poverty. South Africa is a poverty-stricken nation, and KwaZulu-Natal is no different - instead, the South African Multidimensional Poverty Index listed the province in 2011 as the country’s second-poorest, and it is those with the least who suffered the most. The Presidential Climate Commission’s brief on the 2022 floods noted that residents of informal settlements located on steep hillsides (a terrain common in the province) were most severely affected - and this comes as little surprise. The impoverished generally experience greater damages proportional to total assets between various global disasters, and take longer to recover than those with more.
If the root causes of poverty are not addressed, no infrastructural improvements will successfully protect cheaply-built and structurally poor homes from being created. Attempts to regulate space and rigorously uphold building regulations cannot aid those without the resources to implement those regulations - rather, it is more likely that subjects of severer standards will be left without a home, rather than an improved one. To truly abate the effects of increasingly severe floods, infrastructure improvements need to be complemented by a wholesale reduction in poverty levels throughout the province.
The path is clear - we must develop suitable drainage infrastructure, reduce poverty, and mitigate the effects of climate change in order to prevent tragedy from recurring. However, as noted earlier, government inaction (as well as widespread national corruption) does not bode well for future improvements. We need to increase pressure on governments through effective advocacy in order to reduce corruption and inspire real, significant change. It may be a Herculean task, but it is one we must undertake to make the world - as cliché as the saying is - a better place.
1. It should be noted that the SAMPI is calculated based on a broad range of variables, and thus does not necessarily reflect income or GDP per capita levels.
Edited by GORSTRA Team | Photo Credits: Darren Stewart/Gallo Images