Cape Town - With rural communities differentially exposed to degrees and types of climate variability and extreme weather events, a new initiative has been launched by rural community-based organisations and faith leaders to bring a grassroots bottom-up approach to building climate resilience in these communities.
The Rural Action for Climate Resilience project was created by the South African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (Safcei) in partnership with the Social Change Assistance Trust, Heinrich Boll Stiftung, and co-funded by the EU.
These groups sought to directly increase the capacity of communities in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, and Northern Cape to respond to climate emergencies through social, economic, and environmental resilience interventions shared in this project.
Safcei spokesperson Francesca de Gasparis said that because of their remoteness and challenges they faced, these communities were on the frontline of climate change and environmental degradation.
“We often hear about policies and what government is doing at national level, but we wanted to bring the lens to local government and to rural communities and say, what’s being done to support them.
“We believe this is the way to address climate change,” De Gasparis said.
De Gasparis said the project helped rural communities understand what was meant by climate change, why it affected women more than men, and how they could learn to cope.
The project also assisted with core and micro-grants that enabled communities to put their own projects in place in response to climate change.
Charles Simane, policy researcher and organiser at the Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre and Climate Justice Charter Movement, said rural households were more vulnerable to climate shocks for several reasons.
“Some of the reasons that affirm this vulnerability of rural households are that they often directly rely on the environment, be it subsistence farming or animal husbandry and the like.
“Second, they do not have the adaptive capacity; they lack the financial resources to mitigate climate shocks. Third, rural houses have been built on geography that is not informed by any form of surveying and is simply not adequate for the violent weather of a changing climate,” Simane said.
He added that there has been very little attempt, especially by the state, to inform rural households about the climate crisis and that early warning systems in rural areas were simply non-existent.