As South Africa battles the third wave of Covid-19 vaccinations and amidst the chaos, destruction and looting that has taken place in parts of South Africa in recent weeks it’s easy to forget another looming catastrophe: a water crisis with potentially devastating consequences. In the Eastern Cape dam levels are perilously low after a multi-year drought with dams servicing … [Read more...]
Highly allergenic ragweed invades South Africa
This week scientists made a landmark discovery when ragweed – a highly allergenic weed native to North America – was detected in South African pollen spore traps for the very first time. The discovery was made by Dr Dilys Berman, an aerobiologist at UCT and Prof Jonny Peter, who heads up the UCT Lung Institute’s Allergy Unit. Palynologist, Dr Frank Neumann, based at Wits … [Read more...]
Urgent action needed to remedy South Africa’s water crisis
In 2002 South Africa officially became a water constrained economy, when the National Water Resource Strategy reported that we had allocated 98% of our total water resource. Subsequent high confidence studies have shown that we over-estimated the water available at the time, so in short, we have allocated all the water that we have. This means that we are simply unable to grow … [Read more...]
