The City of Cape Town has issued the December 2011 issue of its bi-annual Enviroworks newsletter, appropriately themed around climate change. It covers the major socio-economic challenge of climate change, with contributions by leading experts. There are articles on how the Western Cape’s climate can be expected to change, the energy picture and the Climate Smart Cape Town campaign. There’s also a piece on the African Mayors Climate Change Declaration.
Bruce Hewitson, South African Research Chair in Climate Change and Director: Climate Systems Analysis Group (CSAG), and an IPCC Lead Author, summarizes our challenge:
We have a good understanding that the region will continue to warm, and that the warming will be greater further inland away from the coast. Likewise, we are confident that, on average, the rainfall intensity will increase. We are reasonably confident that the large high-pressure systems that cause the south-easter in Cape Town will strengthen. We have an emerging understanding of the pattern of rainfall changes and the impacts on seasonality. We can develop messages that, in a risk management context, are useful information to inform our decision making.
I mentioned Hewitson’s regional climate modeling work when I wrote about COP15 in Copenhagen.