The Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) has welcomed the declaration of a state of national disaster in relation to the deadly flooding that has devastated the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces in particular in January.

However, the advisory body has also called for a holistic reassessment of climate risks, noting that the floods coincided with other domestic climate-related disasters, including destructive wildfires in the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape, as well as the Knysna water crisis.

“These overlapping shocks illustrate how climate change is intensifying multi-hazard risk across regions and sectors,” PCC executive director Dorah Modise said in a statement.

Besides representing a humanitarian crisis, the disasters were also an economic shock affecting tourism and travel, as well as agricultural production.

“As a national advisory body tasked with providing advice and mobilising multistakeholder action on our climate response measures, the PCC believes that this moment calls for holistic assessment and decisive forward-looking action.”

In the meantime, the PCC reiterated the recommendations arising from an assessment conducted following the KwaZulu-Natal floods. This found that the negative impacts had been amplified by chronic under-resourcing of local government, fragmented coordination, underinvestment in prevention and preparedness, weak enforcement of land-use controls, and under-maintained stormwater systems.

The recommendations called for a strengthening of early warning systems that link climate science to local decision-making; embedding climate risk systematically into land-use planning, infrastructure design, and public investment decisions; building municipal delivery capacity; combining engineered infrastructure with ecosystem-based approaches to manage flood risk; and improving cooperative governance across national, provincial, and local spheres.

“The PCC also notes that the Climate Change Response Fund, currently at the conceptual design stage, can provide an important national mechanism to support resilience-building efforts that are aligned with long-term adaptation objectives.”