Community-based adaptation: Fishing

Community-based adaptation to climate change focuses on people and their relationship to the resources around them.

EMG worked with small-scale farmer organisations and artisanal fishers in exploring how they can build their community's resilience to the impacts of climate change. Together with each group, we tried to gain a deeper understanding of the particular impacts of climate change on their lives and livelihoods, explored the questions that concern them, and developed a set of action-research activities to pursue. Apart from bringing benefits to the participating groups, the work aimed to test and promote an Action Research methodology.

The impetus for some of this work came out of the testimonies made to the Pan-African Climate Change Hearings, hosted by EMG and Oxfam in Cape Town in October 2009.

Links:

If you'd like to read the full article, download here

Click here to read the testimonies from South African participants.

Action Research methodology 

Visit the National Lotteries Board website 

Participatory Adaptation Handbook

Participatory Adaptation Handbook : A practitioner's guide for facilitating people centred adaptation to climate change

EMG is part of the consortium responsible for planning, writing and launching this fantastic resource for anyone involved in community-based adaptation work.

LINK: Download the Participatory Adaptation Handbook (3.1MB PDF)

or contact us for a hard-copy. Accompanying the book is a set of facilitation cards Experiental Learning for Adaptation - an amazing resource for anyone wanting to facilitate a community group.

Young voices on Climate Change II

In our last post we included, as part of our Lotto Environmental Justice Programme we carried articles from two of the interns on the project Abonga and Sizwe, and three of their friends Xolisa, Loyiso and Lonwabo, who are participating in the Climate Tracker: Path to Paris Programme. These short pieces focused on aspects of Climate Change that interest them and count towards helping them get to Paris for the COP21. The great news is that Sizwe is in Paris as this is being posed! Congratulations Sizwe! Here is a picture of him at the airport with his friends saying Bon Voyage! 

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To keep the Environmental Justice Flag flying in South Africa while Sizwe is away Abonga, Xolisa, Loyiso and Lonwabo have written more excellent articles which you can read below.

LINKS:

To read the entire article and all the stories, download here.

Abonga Tom's story: The Importance of solar power in South Africa

Lonwabo Mfenguza's story: Water is not an infinite resource

Loyiso Hulushe's story: Sustain the people

Xolisa Bangani's story: Energy crisis in the dark continent of Africa

Small-scale farmers

From our field office in Nieuwoudtville, EMG has been working with small-scale rooibos farmers of the Suid-Bokkeveld for some years, assisting them in accessing fair trade and organic markets. For these farmers, marginalised by apartheid and the monopoly rooibos processing industry, the higher prices obtained on the fair trade and organic markets, mean that tea-growing is no longer merely a survival strategy, but a viable farming activity.

EMG provides a range of on-going support to Suid-Bokkeveld farmers organised under the Heiveld Co-operative, representing some 60 small-scale farmers and their dependents. With access to alternative trading systems comes supportive financing and training. The farmers have been able to raise capital to build their own tea-processing facility and have recently purchased their own administrative and processing facility in the village of Nieuwoudtville.
As their farming activities have become more profitable, so opportunities for building sustainable farming practices have increased.

EMG has also worked closely with small-scale farmers of the Eksteenskuil Agricultural Co-operative, who farm along the Orange River and produce fair trade certified sun-dried raisins and sultanas, with the Ericaville Farmers Association, and with small-scale farmers of Wupperthal.

Wild rooibos tea

The leaves and young shoots of the rooibos bush (Aspalathus linearis) have been used by indigenous peoples of the Western Cape since pre-history to produce a health-giving beverage known as rooibos tea. It was only in the early 1900s that the species began to be cultivated on a commercial basis.

The cultivated rooibos variety is fast-growing and high-yielding, but less resistant to pests and drought than wild varieties. Because of increasing demand, much of the species natural habitat has been plowed up and put under intensive mono-crop cultivation. There are very few areas remaining where wild tea plants can still be found in marginal and mountainous areas. Like the wild tea, small-scale "coloured" farmers were also limited to the more marginal areas by successive colonial and apartheid laws. Communities of small-scale rooibos farmers have been harvesting wild and cultivated rooibos for many generations, and have become the de facto guardians of the wild rooibos genetic stock.

LINKS:

To read the full article, download here.

EMG facilitated a programme of Action Research with small-farmers of the Heiveld Co-op and Wupperthal Co-op to identify, characterise and map populations of wild tea.

The knowledge built up in this action-research programme has been collected in the publication The Sustainable Harvest of Wild Rooibos, also available in Afrikaans hard-copy from EMG.

Farm restoration in Northern Cape in the spotlight

Scarred land: over a century of heavy farming has cut water erosion dongas into this treasured renosterveld hillside near Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape. Photo: Noel Oettle©

Catching the fall: a ‘check dam’ helps slow and spread the water which would otherwise cut this gully deeper, allowing soil to settle, seeds to germinate and plants to take root. Photo: Noel Oettle©

NIEUWOUDTVILLE: The scars run chest-deep in the grainy tillite clay on the renosterveld slopes of the Bokkeveld plateau, outside Nieuwoudtville in the Northern Cape. Their walls are hard as cement, baked solid by the sun since their topsoil has long since been carved away through the  scouring action of rain water. 

Some of these fissures are over a century old, slashed into the hillside by water erosion following overgrazing, the plough shear and failed contour lines where previous generations of farmers tried to stop tilled soils from washing away.

But now, just three years after erosion control measures were started by the Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) at a demonstration site on the farm Avontuur, and the land is showing signs of recovery.

Tiny shrubs, succulents and flowering plants have started to bristle out of the sediment that’s been trapped by small ‘check dams’ made of poles, rocks and geotextile, a biodegradable hessian-like fabric.

Links:

Full article available here.

For more information on the Avontuur Sustainable Agriculture, visit http://avontuur.org.za or contact EMG at 027 218 1117. 

Water and Climate Change Policy Brief, August 2016

Discussed in this policy brief are the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) draft norms and standards, the DWS draft national pricing strategy, citizen monitoring of the National Water Resources Strategy 2 (NWRS2), Catchment Management Forums, the Minister's Budget Speech, amongst other things. 

LINKS:

This is an update on policy processes and other recent developments in the water sector - available HERE.

Proceedings from symposium on water governance, October 2016

In October 2016 EMG, in partnership with the South African Water Caucus, the Water Research Commission, UBC's Program on Water Governance and Rhodes University's ELRC, hosted a multi-stakeholder symposium on water governance. This was an opportunity to share lessons from the 'Citizen Monitoring of the NWRS2' project, and to talk about what water governance should truly look like in a participatory democracy. 

Links:

You can read the proceedings here

Changing Practice Case Studies 2016

In 2015 - 2016, members of the South African Water Caucus embarked on 'The Changing Practice' course, offered by the Environmental Learning Research Centre at Rhodes University. The project was coordinated by EMG, with funding from the WRC, and the course was intended to boost SAWC member's capacity to monitor the NWRS2. The participants were grouped according to provincial water caucuses, in three provinces - Mpumalanga, Western Cape and Gauteng (the Vaal). Each group worked on a collaborative change project which they wrote up as a case study. Below are the participants final case study booklets.

'Devices put livelihoods at risk in Dunoon' by Thabo Lusithi and Manelisi James (Western Cape Water Caucus) Download here

'Saving Moholoholo' by December Ndhlovu, Patricia Mdluli and Alex Mashile (Mpumalanga Water Caucus) Download here

'Water and Tradition' by Mduduzi Tshabalala, Thandiwe Ngcanga and Samson Mokoena (Gauteng Water Caucus) Download here

EMG's guide to the Cape Town drought, January 2018

Are you confused about Cape Town’s drought or terrified at the prospect of running out of  water? Perhaps, like us, you’ve been frantically reading all the articles desperately trying to make sense of the contradictory statements, looking for someone to blame (at least momentarily) but more importantly trying to find out what you can do so that there’s still water to flush your toilet in mid-2018. Maybe you’re living in Grahamstown or somewhere in Limpopo with the same fears but none of the news. And then perhaps you take a step back and wonder what will happen when it rains again and the dams fill up – who will pay for the expensive desalination plants? But will it rain again? Will the dams ever fill up?

LINKS:

These few pages are to help you through the chaos, to bring some order to the disorder : Read our guide