Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This research focuses on the estimation of the impacts of climate change on water yield, streamflow extremes, and the streamflow regimes in the Cline River Watershed, and consequently, water availability for hydropower generation in this area. The Cline River Watershed comprises the flow into Lake Abraham, the reservoir for Bighorn Dam, is part of the upper North Saskatchewan River basin (UNSRB). This objective was achieved by parameterizing the ACRU agro-hydrological modelling system. After parameterization was complete, ACRU output was calibrated and verified against available observed data, including temperature, snow water equivalent, glacier mass balance, potential evapotranspiration, and streamflow data. After ACRU was properly verified, five selected climate change scenarios to estimate impacts of climate change in this area. Overall water yields are projected to increase over time. A large shift in seasonality is likely the biggest impact climate change will have on water resources in the Cline River Watershed. / xii, 126 leaves : ill., maps ; 29 cm

As the debate on the impacts of global climate change goes on at global and regional scale, climate change impacts are already being felt at local level. The thesis aims at exploring climate change as a driver of environmental and smallholder farmers’ livelihood vulnerability in Makonde District of Zimbabwe. Specifically the study seeks to: determine climate change trends and manifestations; evaluate household-level impacts of climate change and associated environmental changes on smallholder farmers’ livelihoods and lastly; to investigate the extent of household-level coping and adaptation strategies to climate change in the Makonde rural community in Zimbabwe, especially farmers in Makonde Communal Lands. Given the fact that the subject under study is multidimensional in scope, a mix of research methods was adopted in this case study. Whilst it is largely qualitative in design, the study involved some quantitative data and thus, a triangulation of different data sources and data gathering instruments was employed. The instruments used include; key informant interviews, structured observations and a household questionnaire survey. The analysis was based on a final sample of 434 out of the originally anticipated 500 households. In addition to the households’ sample, were twenty key informants and transect walk observations. The qualitative data was analyzed by means of coding, memoing, descriptions, typologies, taxonomies and visual representations, whilst quantitative data was processed through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and complimented by Microsoft Excel to generate various forms of descriptive statistics. The findings suggest that climate change in the Makonde Rural District that includes the Makonde Communal Lands has been significant during the past thirty years. The climate change has contributed to significant local environmental stresses affecting local resources such as forests, fauna, water, pastures and soil among other natural assets. The local livelihoods show high levels of vulnerability to climate change due to notable low adaptive capacity. The high level of vulnerability to changing climate is exposing the study population to increased prevalence of: poverty, crop and livestock failures, food insecurity, malnutrition, disease and rural urban migration among other impacts. The study concludes that the factors creating barriers to climate change adaptation are related those contributing to poverty and holding back sustainable local development. Among the key suggestions to enhance the community’s climate change adaptation capacity, the thesis presents an establishment of a government-driven, multi-dimensional and multi-stakeholder intervention mechanism to help local communities manage their vulnerability. / Environmental Sciences / D. Litt. et Phil. (Environmental Management)

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies (GAES). Johannesburg, October 2017. / Climate and weather-related impacts have become widespread particularly affecting the tourism industry. Changes in the climate and weather lead to changes in tourist seasons, products and travel opportunities. Flooding has gained research attention over the past decade, since the destruction creates many challenges for tourism businesses. Floods are a growing global problem, increasing in terms of frequency of occurrence, property damages, business economic losses, and fatalities. South Africa has begun to experience many annual flood events both coastal and in-land, but the Limpopo Province has been declared as flood disaster area, since the increase in temperatures and precipitation. Interest now lies on how particular tourist destinations in the Limpopo Province can adapt to reduce flooding risks whilst increasing opportunities mainly for the economy. Debates around flooding costs, recovery processes, and adaptive capacities affirm to be more challenging for the tourism accommodation sector. The study aimed to explore the perceived flooding impacts on different types of tourist accommodation. Thus, to determine if floods hindered any tourist bookings, offerings, and tourist length of stay. The exploration verified the possible flood risks to vulnerable accommodation and no adequate adaptation plans. A purposeful sample of 145 tourist accommodation businesses located across three flood-prone regions of the Limpopo Province were selected to answer a semi-structured questionnaire to put across their flooding experiences from a management perspective. The semi-structured questionnaire was combined with telephone interviews and email responses. Coherent theme development within the theoretical framework was achieved through content analysis. Content analysis allowed for the critical discussion of deductive and inductive themes found in the results. Floods during peak-seasons threaten and affect tourist accommodation, leaving them behind in business. Those not affected benefit with increased tourist demand and new opportunities in the hospitality industry. Tourist accommodation businesses are exposed to flood risks and experience challenges to assess, recover and adapt from the direct and indirect impacts. Alongside the destruction of tourism in these regions, were concerns of the provision of flood mapping and flood management plans for tourism businesses. Wider flooding impacts on the environment and the surrounding local communities demonstrates a growing problem for the future. Key words: floods; tourist accommodation; flooding impacts; risks; opportunities; tourist demand; adaptation; flood recovery, flood mapping, flood management plans. / LG2018

Thesis (M.Phil. (Environmental Law and Management)) -- University of Limpopo, 2009 / In recent years, a lot has been said about global warming and climate change. Governments and Institutions have been congregating more frequently all over the world. The subject of global warming and climate change is believed to be a ticking time bomb, which can have catastrophic effects on the existence of the human race and other living organisms. This led me to think and ponder about all our coastal towns in South Africa. What would happen if the melting of the glaciers continues and the sea levels rise by over two meters? This surely is a recipe for disaster and hence a look at the Western Cape Province was really necessary to find out on the province and the country‟s preparedness. Climate change has been scientifically proven to be occurring and is being aggravated by industrialisation1. With South Africa being the 19th Green House Gas (GHG) emitter in the world, the government should definitely take action by either mitigating or adapting to these effects.2 Rightly so, something is being done not only at national level, but at a regional and international level. A number of treaties, conventions and protocols to do with climate change and its related effects have been passed and ratified by most countries. The most notable international protocol is the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change‟s (UNFCCC) Kyoto protocol. At a regional level, New Partnership for Africa‟s Development (NEPAD) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), have come in support of environmental initiatives like the Atmospheric Pollution Information Network for Africa (APINA). The Western Cape Province, in line with most of these agreements and national strategies, have come up with their own polices in trying to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

Due to escalating carbon-based emissions, anthropogenic climate change is wreaking havoc on the natural and built environment as higher near-surface temperatures cause arctic ice-melt, rising sea levels and unpredictable turbulent weather patterns. The effects are especially devastating to inhabitants living in the water-worlds of developing countries where environmental pressure only exacerbates their vulnerability to oppressive economic policies. As climatic and economic pressures escalate, threats to local resources, living space, safety and security are all reaching a tipping point. Climate refugees may survive, but they will fall victim to displacement, economic insecurity, and socio-cultural destruction. With the current economic system in peril, it is now a matter of urgency that the global community determine ways to modify their behaviour in order to minimize the impact of climate change. This interdisciplinary comparative analysis contributes to the dialogue by turning to environmental history for similar scenarios with contrasting outcomes. It isolates two North Atlantic water-worlds and their inhabitants at an historical juncture when the combination of climatic and economic pressures threatened their survival. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Hebrideans in the Scottish Insular Gàidhealtachd and the Wabanaki in Ketakamigwa were both responding to the harsh conditions of the ‘Little Ice Age.’ While modifying their resource management, settlement patterns, and subsistence behaviours to accommodate climate change, they were simultaneously targeted by foreign opportunists whose practices and perceptions inevitably induced oppressive economic pressure. This critical period in their history serves as the centre of a pendulum that swings back to deglaciation and then forward again to the eighteenth century to examine the relationship between climate change and human behaviour in the North Atlantic. It will be demonstrated that both favourable and deteriorating climate conditions determine resource availability, but how humans manage those resources during feast or famine can determine their collective vulnerability to predators when the climate changes. It is argued that, historically, climate has determined levels of human development and survival on either side of the North Atlantic, regardless of sustainable practices. However, when cultural groups were under extreme environmental and economic pressure, there were additional factors that determined their fate. First, the condition of their native environment and prospect for continuing to inhabit it was partially determined by the level of sustainable practices. And, secondly, the way in which they perceived and treated one another partially determined their endurance. If they avoided internal stratification and self-protectionism by prioritising the needs of the group over that of the individual, they minimised fragmentation, avoided displacement, and maintained their social and culture cohesion.

This thesis is focused on determining the rate at which the climate of western North America (WNA) has changed in recent history, and looks at the impact that projected future climatic changes will have on a large glaciated watershed in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The rate of change over WNA is quantified for 485 climate stations for the period 1950-2005 using indicators developed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Results of the analysis show statistically significant historical trends across the study area. To gauge the effect of climate change on glaciers, a mass balance model was developed and integrated with the University of Lethbridge GENESYS hydrometeorological model. GCM future climate scenarios were used to model change in the Upper North Saskatchewan River Basin through 2100. Results forecast dramatic declines (> 80%) in total glacier area, ice volume, and streamflow contribution by 2100. / ix, 137 leaves ; 29 cm

To meet society’s needs for water, food, fuel and fibre the natural land cover throughout the world has been extensively altered. These alterations have impacted on hydrological responses and thus on available water resources, as the hydrological responses of a catchment are dependent upon, and sensitive to, changes in the land use. Similarly, changes in the climate through enhanced carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have resulted in increased temperature and altered precipitation patterns that alter hydrological responses. In combination, land use change and global climate change form a complex and interactive system, whereby both human influences and climate change manipulate land use patterns, and changes in land uses feed back to influence the climate system, with both impacting on hydrological responses. Relatively few studies have been undertaken examining the combined impacts of climate change and land use change on water resources, with no consensus emerging as yet as to combined influence of land use change and climate change on hydrological responses and the role of geographical characteristics in determining the overriding influence. There is, however, agreement that the effect on hydrological responses will be amplified. Given that South Africa is currently water stressed and considered to be highly exposed to climate change impacts, an understanding of hydrological responses to the complex interactions between land use and climate change is crucial to allow for improved integration of land use planning in conjunction with climate change adaptation into water resources management. To determine the sensitivity of land use to changing climate, a sensitivity study assessing the potential impacts of climate change on the areas climatically suitable for key plantation forestry species was undertaken. Under sensitivity scenarios of climate change the climatically optimum areas for specific forest species were shown to shift, with optimum areas changing in extent and location between and within South Africa’s provinces. With potential for shifts in land use due to climate change shown, the imperative to improve understanding of the dynamics between land use and climate change as well as the subsequent impacts on hydrological responses was further established. For the assessment of climate-land use-water interactions, a process-based hydrological model, sensitive to land use and climate, and changes thereof, viz. the daily time step ACRU model was selected. In order to increase the confidence in results from the model in a study such as this, its representation of reality was confirmed by comparing simulated streamflow output against observations across a range of climatic conditions and land uses. This comparison was undertaken in the three diverse South African catchments chosen for the study, viz. the semi-arid, sub-tropical Luvuvhu catchment in the north of the country, which has a large proportion of subsistence agriculture and informal residential areas, the Upper Breede catchment in the winter rainfall regions of the south, where the primary land uses are commercial orchards and vineyards, and the sub-humid Mgeni catchment along the eastern seaboard, where plantation forestry is dominant in the upper reaches, commercial plantation sugarcane and urban areas in the middle reaches, and urban areas dominate the lower reaches. Thus, in effect a space for time study was undertaken, thereby reducing the uncertainty of the model’s ability to cope with the projected future climate scenarios. Overall the ACRU model was able to represent the high, low and total flows, and thus it was concluded that the model could be used with confidence to simulate the streamflows of the three selected catchments and was able to represent the hydrological responses from the range of climates and diversity of land uses present within the catchments. With the suitability of the model established for the theme of this research, the understanding of the complex interactions between hydrological responses and land use could be improved. The hydrological responses of the three selected catchments to land use change were varied. Results showed that the location of specific land uses within a catchment plays an important role in the response of the streamflow of the catchment to that land use change. Furthermore, it was shown that the contributions of different land uses to the streamflow generated from a catchment are not proportional to the relative area of those land uses, and the relative contribution of the land use to the catchment streamflow varies with the annual rainfall of the catchment. With an improved understanding of the dynamics between land uses and hydrological responses, the impacts of climate change on hydrological responses were assessed prior to analysing the combined impacts on land use and climate change. Five plausible climate projections from three coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate models covering three SRES emissions scenarios which were downscaled with the RCA3 regional climate model and adjusted using the distribution-based scaling (DBS) approach for bias correction were used as climate input to the ACRU model, with future projections applied to a baseline land cover scenario compared to historical climate applied to the same baseline land cover scenario. No consistent direction of change in the streamflow responses was evident in the Mgeni and Luvuvhu catchments. However, decreases in streamflow responses were evident for all five scenarios for the Upper Breede. With an understanding of the separate impacts of land use and climate change on hydrological responses, an analysis of the combined impacts was undertaken to determine which changes were projected to be of greater importance in different geographical locations. Results indicated that the drier the climate becomes, the relatively more significant the role of land use becomes, as its impact becomes relatively greater. The impacts of combined land use and climate change on the catchments’ streamflow responses varied across both the temporal and spatial scales, with the nature of the land use and the magnitude of the projected climate change having significant impacts on the streamflow responses. From the research undertaken, the key results were • that the climatic variable to which plantation forestry species are most sensitive is rainfall; • that optimum growth areas for plantation forestry are projected to shift under changing climates, having a potentially significant impact on the landscape and thus on the hydrological responses from the landscape; • that the daily time-step, physical-conceptual and process-based ACRU model is appropriate for use in land use change and climatic change impact studies as shown through a space for time study; • that the contributions of different land uses to the streamflow generated from a catchment is not proportional to the relative area of that land use and that, as the mean annual precipitation of a subcatchment decreases, so the disparities between the relative areas a land use occupies and its contribution to catchment streamflow increases; • that specific land use changes have a greater impact on different components of the hydrological response of a catchment; • that land uses which currently have significant impacts on catchment water resources will place proportionally greater impacts on the catchment’s water resources if the climate were to become drier; thus the drier the climate becomes, the more relatively significant the role of land use becomes; • that when considering any hydrological impacts of land use change, climate change or combined land use and climate change, assessments need to consider the scale where the localized impacts may be evident, the progression of the impacts as the streamflow cascades through the catchment, as well as the impacts at the whole catchment scale where the accumulation of the effects through the catchment are evident; and lastly • that each catchment is unique with its own complexities, feed forwards and feedbacks, thus each catchment will have a unique threshold as to where land use change or climate change begins to have a significant influence of the hydrological response. Given these complex interactions between land use, climate and water, there is a growing imperative to improve the understanding of the movement of water within catchments, to be receptive and adaptive to new concepts and information, and to developing resilient and adaptive water management strategies for the future in a way that minimises the risks and maximises the benefits to potential impacts of climate change. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

Along with increasing awareness of the realities of environmental degradation and climate change, governments around the world are now implementing strategies aimed at mitigating and adapting to these changes. While a significant effort is being made to negotiate environmental and climate politics at the international level, the importance of local environmental and climate governance has received more attention recently, as it is acknowledged that both the causes and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation inevitably originate and happen locally. This dissertation aims to contribute to the research on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the African context through the analysis of local environmental and climate governance and governmentality in eThekwini municipality in South Africa. The aim of the study was to explore environmental governmentality in eThekwini municipality, by reflecting on the processes and outcomes of the COP17/CMP7 Responsible Accommodation Campaign, a part of the Greening COP17/CMP7 programme in Durban in 2011. Within this there were five main objectives: 1) to describe the current state of environmental and climate governance in eThekwini municipality, 2) to identify and explore the factors driving the COP17/CMP7 Responsible Accommodation Campaign, 3) to describe and evaluate the outcomes of the COP17/CMP7 Responsible Accommodation Campaign, 4) to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of the COP17/CMP7 Responsible Accommodation Campaign, and 5) to reflect on how the COP17/CMP7 Responsible Accommodation Campaign reveals the form of governmentality present in eThekwini municipality. The research consisted of three parts; observation of the planning processes of the Campaign, qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in the Campaign, and a questionnaire for a sample of the participants of the Campaign. Through an analysis based on the Focaultian governmentality theory, and Bulkeley and Kern’s (2006) local climate governing framework, the study shows that Durban’s environmental governance is mainly in the form of self-governing and governing through enabling, motivated by the ‘rationalities’ of greening the economy and creating a green event destination brand for the city. While these policies are welcomed by a portion of the private sector, this study has found that a broader aspect of governing modes and ‘technologies’ of rule is needed if the policies are to affect the broader population, in this case the hospitality sector. This requires the city government to continue to take responsibility as a leader of environmental and climate governance, and move towards a mode of governing that also involves the provision of incentives and services that enable more responsible business and individual practices in the city. The findings of this study provide useful insights into the needs of the hospitality sector specifically, as well as the form of governmentality in the city in general, that can inform future climate policy making in Durban. / Thesis (M.Dev.Studies)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.