South Africa must start managing its retreat from the coast
But like coastal local authorities everywhere, they have a daunting task in implementing the next crucial steps — removing vulnerable infrastructure, consulting with communities and property owners, leading discussions about how to finance the work and facilitating some form of compensatory regime.
After all, city planning departments worldwide have blithely allowed market-driven infrastructure development in the stupidest places. Cape Town and Durban are getting their acts together, but the damage of bad planning decisions has been done for decades, and in some places still continues.
Fortunately, South Africa has an important legal mechanism for coastal adaptation. The National Environmental Management: Integrated Coastal Management Act defines a basis for coastal set-back lines and provides for coastal management programs at national, provincial and municipal levels. But tragically, it is not retroactive, and it contains loopholes.
Existing infrastructure, including housing, sewerage and electricity infrastructure, can generally stay where it is. And herein lies the rub. Local authorities must currently figure out the messy realities of implementing a managed retreat themselves. And political leaders find it easier to look the other way as long as possible.
Be prepared or caught unawares
Adaptation to climate change anywhere would be promoted, made much more orderly and much more cost-effective by a legislative, policy and financing framework to support this proactive retreat, and to protect and restore coastal “ecological infrastructure.”
The coastline and near-shore environment itself, with beaches, mangroves, reefs, fringing dunes, estuaries, cliffs, and sandy plains, is all crucial ecological infrastructure. It’s also a complex, enormously powerful defense against the inexorable march inwards of stormy seas.
This coastal ecological infrastructure is among our most important assets, and normally completely “free” — preventing in many areas the need for expensive and ugly concrete sea walls, tidal barrages, and other hard infrastructure networks.
So where coastal ecological infrastructure remains, it must be protected. Where it is degraded — as in most cities — it must be actively restored to buffer communities from sea level rise and storm surges.
And where it has been lost altogether to rampant coastal development, we must bite the bullet and remove hard buildings, roads, and service infrastructure to restore it.
The alternative is a treacherous coastline, littered with rusting hulks of drowned and broken buildings, displaced coastal communities, and attendant impacts on health, food security, disaster risk management, and social and economic stability.
South Africa has a particularly progressive policy framework on climate change. That’s a real asset. But it’s time to grab the bull by the horns and get to grips with the reality of planning and implementing a proactive retreat from our coastlines.
Phoebe Barnard is Lead Climate Scientist, SANBI; Lead Researcher, Climate Change Vulnerability and Bioadaptation at University of Cape Town. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives.
