Limpopo Province Tour

Surviving with Climate Changes – Impacts and Implications

Limpopo Province is a dryland region that not only faces the ravages of current climate variability, but may also experience future climate stress on top of the many other challenges of development in a changing South Africa.

The challenge of adapting to climate in a dryland region like Limpopo Province in South Africa is not one of only responding to varying climate risks but also of trying to live better with current complex changes. Research by the University of Cape Town, the Stockholm Environment Institute of the Witwatersrand showed that although climate change may contribute to vulnerability of livelihoods, there are other factors causing stress- such as lack of access to water, unemployment or HIV/AIDS- that people see as more pressing.

The South African Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI) framework provides a lens for viewing the role of multiple factors on local adaptive capacity. Through this framework, we can see that adaptation to climate and other risks in the Limpopo Province goes well beyond the need for short-term coping mechanisms.

SAVI framework identifies three pathways of interaction between multiple processes of change. These are;
• Multiple processes may lead to similar outcomes for a particular household, region or community which together can have synergistic effects.
• One process may create changes in the social, economic, cultural or institutional context, diminishing the capacity of the household, community or social group to respond to other changes.
• One process may create feedbacks that drive other processes and increase or lower exposure to future shocks and transformations and in some instances, historically-rooted factors.

Complex interacting factors hinder local adaptive capacity. The lack of access to drought insurance or loans, for example, often preludes the purchase of land, fertilizers, machinery, fencing or generators that could enable communities to better manage risks.
Gender access to resources is also critical factor; female-led households have limited access to both income and assets and may not be able to produce enough grain to ensure household food security.

Research down suggests that much greater effort is needed to understand the interaction and feedbacks among multiple stresses.