Our climate crisis, coming councillors and City councils - IOL

South Africa’s incoming municipal councils will face growing pressure to manage the water, food-security, health and economic risks associated with an expected El Niño summer.

South Africa is heading into a fourth-quarter perfect storm. First, a November election that may destabilise efficient governance in several municipalities, many already teetering on the brink of collapse.

With new political alliances being formed and new councillors needing induction, it may take months before the engines of governance restart. This will place many municipalities on the backfoot regarding the developing El Niño climate phenomenon, with seasonal forecasts indicating below-normal rainfall and above-normal temperatures across much of South Africa from October 2026 to at least March 2027.

Our new batch of councillors and mayors will assume office, several whom cannot read or write, and therefore the El Niño threat to our national well-being may not register with the urgency it requires.  

I recently participated as a panellist at the 2026 Nedbank Sustainability and Climate Leadership Conference at GIBS. Our biggest concern about El Niño is not just drought. It is the possibility of a compound climate stress event. South Africa has shown that it can tolerate periods of below-average rainfall reasonably well when dams, groundwater, soils and municipal systems have sufficient reserves.

The danger comes when rainfall deficits accumulate. With all forecasts indicating below-normal rainfall, we face potential Day Zero scenarios in some parts of our country and isolated extreme rainfall events and flooding elsewhere in South Africa.

How will our new mayors and their councillors respond to these vulnerabilities while still finding their institutional feet?

Reduced rainfall affects our dams and our agricultural viability. Food security becomes a big issue. Agriculture will be hit through several simultaneous channels: less rain and higher temperatures, lower soil moisture, and heat stress lead to higher irrigation demands, which reduce agricultural productivity. The Department of Agriculture issued warnings about crop failure, livestock mortality, irrigation restrictions, and pests and disease under hot, dry conditions. 

All of this will eventually become an inflation question. A drought doesn't have to destroy the entire harvest. If it reduces production sufficiently, prices rise. Poorer households spend a larger proportion of their income on food.

The climate shock thus becomes a social-policy shock. But it doesn’t stop there. We tend to conceptualise drought as the absence of rain. Excessive heat will be more immediately dangerous than drought. The El Niño consequence brings with it a rise in temperatures. Heat is a direct physiological stress.

Lorenzo Davids, CEO, Development Impact Fund.

SAWS is warning that if the expected rainfall deficit materialises, severe heatwaves are likely to occur more frequently. El Niño and human-made warming will lead to heat-related illness and mortality, reduced productivity, increased cooling demand, stress on hospitals, greater water consumption, livestock losses, crop damage, and increased fire danger.

Our power stations will face pressure from both sides: less water availability and greater electricity demand. We are not facing “just another drought” in the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027. This is a heat, energy and water stress event.

That is what makes compound climate events so dangerous. They don't remain inside one sector. Fires, especially in informal settlements, will become a major secondary disaster. Hotter temperatures, dry vegetation, low humidity and dry soils create conditions in which veld fires can spread rapidly. This deserves much more attention.

The poorest South Africans will experience the effects of El Niño the worst because the people most dependent upon informal livelihoods, agriculture, livestock, municipal services and who suffer food and water insecurity are particularly exposed. Beyond being an environmental phenomenon, El Niño is also a distributional crisis. With our high unemployment and poverty levels, poorer households can’t afford to buy bottled water, install tanks, install solar power, improve insulation, or stock food before prices increase. Their wood, zinc and iron shacks will become ovens during the coming summer. Infants, young children and older people will be particularly vulnerable to heat stress and dehydration.

Our new councillors will have to address the rainfall deficit, water restrictions, agricultural losses, higher food prices, heat stress, and increased demand for government assistance. This will, in many instances, lead to political conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. They will quickly learn that an understanding of our climate crisis is an act of good governance. Future municipalities will have to show how well they govern scarcity.

How much money will we need to respond to El Niño? What would it cost South Africa if we fail to prepare before the impacts arrive? We cannot depend on reactive expenditure. Government must invest in well-informed preventative expenditure. It needs to finance its capacity to survive a more volatile climate regime.

As we prepare for a major climate event, a more uncomfortable question needs to be asked: are those on the ballot seeking municipal office equipped to manage the economic and social consequences that may accompany El Niño? Climate competency is now a more urgent qualification for political and community leadership.