Should Your Party Save You From Floods? Voters Think So

• Last week, the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal was mopping up damage after being battered by heavy, unexpected rainfall over the weekend almost 50 times more in 24 hours than what the usual daily average is here.

• Extreme weather events like this will happen often and become more intense as our planets climate changes, experts say, and buffering communities against them needs political will.

• Yet climate change gets fairly little attention in election talks. Voters say this is not okay.

What do our political parties have to say about climate change this elections? Not much, says Linda Pretorius in todays newsletter . Sign up .

COMMENT

With 4.2-billion people across 50 countries almost half the worlds population voting for their next governments this year, the biggest threat to security that modern humans have ever faced should be at the top of election talks.

Yet worldwide climate change is getting fairly little airtime in politicians campaigns .

From reading the manifestos of the 16 largest political groups in South Africas upcoming elections this year, its clear that their understanding of how deeply entangled the relationship is between the countrys action on climate change today and our prospects for prosperity and social safety in the future is worryingly shallow while the electorate is much more clued up.

Last week, the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal was mopping up damage after being battered by heavy, unexpected rainfall over the weekend almost 50 times more in 24 hours than what the usual daily average is here.

Numbers like these make the low political priority given to climate change hard to fathom not least given that, if we keep on pumping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the air at the rate were going now, we might have only six years left to have a reasonable shot at stopping the Earths air from becoming more than 1.5C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century.

This temperature rise is the limit that climate experts say we can buffer before ecosystems, water and food supplies, and peoples health and livelihoods become seriously threatened which means real action is needed now.

As part of a research project called Money Talks , which polled 30 000 people from 15 countries rich and poor to find out what they thought about public investment in responding to climate change, we asked 2 000 South Africans of different ages, income, race and gender groups and from across the country to add their voices.

The results completely surprised us. Here are the three most enlightening findings.

Unemployment, corruption and the cost of living are the top-most priorities for South African voters, causing most concern for between a third and about half of respondents. We were not surprised, given that close to a third of the countrys adults dont have jobs, state capture has eroded public services and our trust in them, and the prices of food , consumer goods and services like power and healthcare have gone up and up in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflicts .

But what did surprise us was that climate change was one of the top ten priorities for voters, with 11% of participants saying its one of their top three issues. It outranked issues such as water and sanitation, having access to social security (for example, pension funds or government grants) and the countrys energy policy. Given that almost a third of the population rely on social grants every month and the dire consequences of power outages for the economy and peoples lives , wed expected these last two issues to feature higher.

The polling data showed that our respondents, regardless of age, education level or where they lived, were really worried about climate change making life worse in the future. Their biggest fears were about living in hotter conditions, that food would get more expensive and that water would get scarcer, including because droughts could become more likely.

On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 meant not being stressed and 10 meant being very concerned, South Africans concern about the negative effects of climate change scored an average of 8.0 almost 18% higher than the average from people in richer countries like Italy, France and Canada. This was similar to the level of worry in other developing countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina, which research shows will be hit harder by the effects of changing weather conditions despite contributing much less to their causes than high-income countries.

When we looked deeper, we found that respondent