Die invloed van klimaatverandering op die Suid-Afrikaanse stad en voorgestelde aanpassings

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to research the effect of climate change on the South African city and to recommend appropriate measures, based on the specific climatic zone. With increased climate change, it is getting increasingly important that the South African city should be resilient. Recently, the CSIR produced new climate and energy maps to replace the SANS 204 (2011) South African National Building Standards six zone climatic region map. To ensure the long-term applicability of the new climate map, it was decided that, over and above the use of historic climatic data, climate change should also be considered. An A2 climate change scenario of the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) for the period 1961-2100 (Engelbrecht et al., 2011: 649) was used. An A2 scenario can be described as business as usual. Recent research predicts that southern Africa can expect a temperature increase of between 4°C to 6°C in hot western dessert areas (Engelbrecht & Engelbrecht, 2016: 247-261). Simultaneously, the amount of energy in the atmosphere increases, causing higher intensity storms (Emanuel, 2005: 686-688). The significant warming will have a severe impact on cities where the so-called Urban Heat Island (UHI) causes cities to be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. These factors indicate that climate change will have a significant impact on the southern African city.