The WaRisCo project addresses two of the biggest risks South Africa faces in a warming world: the occurrence of a ‘day zero’ drought in the Gauteng province, an event that will have a devastating economic impact, and unprecedented mega-flooding in Durban in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, a disaster with the potential to result in the extensive loss of human lives. To quantify these risks in a warmer world, WaRisCo is using a combination of detailed climate models and newly developed, fully mechanistic hydrological models, to anticipate the occurrence of unprecedented droughts and floods in eastern South Africa.
Partnerships with Key Stakeholders
WaRisCo has formed vibrant partnerships with key stakeholders to work towards the implementation of WaRisCo research in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and adaptation plans – within the lifetime of the project. Stakeholders include the Department of Water and Sanitation, the National Disaster Management Centre, Rand Water, uMngeni-uThukela Water, the City of Johannesburg, the City of eThekwini and SASOL. WaRisCo is thus in the strong position of its research finding uptake in national water security planning, national disaster risk reduction policy, operational disaster risk management in the Cities of Johannesburg and eThekwini, and water resource planning within Rand Water (Gauteng province), uMngeni-uThukela Water (KZN province) and industry (SASOL).
The latest stakeholder meetings in March 2025 have been vibrant, with enthusiastic buy-in of the stakeholders, given their general climate change risk awareness and embracement of policy-relevant science. WaRisCo research follows a co-design and co-production process with the stakeholders and has thus-far focused on two aspects. Firstly, the WaRisCo team has been interacting with key technical specialists in the stakeholder organizations who are advising the project team on the operating rules that apply in these highly-engineered water management systems, the statics of water abstraction, and the plans and timelines for future dams. Secondly the stakeholders have been providing advice on tailoring the modelling output, to ensure that suitable models are developed together with, and for, the stakeholders and towards the project results finding maximum uptake in decision making.
Important dams within the study regions have been visited by the WaRisCo team during the stakeholder engagements in March, 2025.
WaRisCo: First Academic Outputs
Prof. Engelbrecht and Dr. Biskop presented on ‘Projected climate change futures of South Africa’s eastern escarpment’ and ‘Projected hydrological futures of South Africa’s mega-dam region’ at the 2nd Southern African Mountain Conference (SAMC) on 17-20 March 2025, in Winterton, South Africa. The importance of the SAMC is in its integrated approach, fostering collaboration among scientists, policymakers, and practitioners to advance sustainable development in southern Africa’s mountain areas.
New WaRisCo collaborations have been established at SAMC, including with the ‘South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON)’, a national research platform focused on long-term environmental monitoring and research and ‘The Northern Drakensberg Collaborative (NDC)’. The latter is a strategic water source area partnership, bringing together communities as well as public and private stakeholders. Its aim is to foster coordinated governance and practical action to enhance the resilience of the water source area, create local opportunities, generate shared benefits downstream, and prevent further degradation of land and water resources, enabling sustainable development.
Additional conference contributions in April 2025 included ‘Hydrological projections for water risk assessment in South Africa’s eastern mega-dam region’ (Biskop et al.) and ‘Identifying trends in extreme hydro-meteorological events to assess water-related hazards in urban-rural areas in South Africa’ (Weber et al.), presented at the EGU General Assembly 2025 in Vienna, Austria.
The first peer-reviewed paper supported by WaRisCo, which explores the role of climate change in the Durban floods of April 2022, has been published at Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment. WaRisCo will report in more detail on this paper in the next WASA newsletter.
Authors:
Dr. Sophie Biskop, Prof. Francois Engelbrecht
For more information and details, please visit the WaRisCo project website.
More information on all seven projects can be found here and in the programme publication.