Dr Crispian Olver, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Commission, speaking on an SAFM breakfast interview, argued that climate change “…is the greatest societal challenge we will ever face.”
He is absolutely correct, so it’s appropriate that on the eve of COP26 concluding its deliberations, we should reflect on the City of Cape Town’s climate change strategy released in 2020. Like many City policies, it appears to be interpreted in very flexible ways by those who hold power at the City. In fact, when it comes to the River Club redevelopment, it’s clear that their planning decisions contradict their own scientific advice on climate change.
Here are some examples of why the River Club redevelopment is bad for climate change.
1. The City of Cape Town climate change strategy document warns that “…urban development in too close a proximity to watercourses, wetlands” can contribute to vulnerability to climate change. The Liesbeek Leisure Property Trust’s (LLPT) solution with regard to the River Club? Get rid of the river. The redevelopment will bury the original natural course of the Liesbeek River. The river will be replaced by an artificial swale, which will enable development to extend to the edge of the swale. Yet it is well known that infill of rivers is entirely at odds with climate change resilience.
2. The City’s climate change strategy refers to Embedded Sustainability as follows: “The City will work to ensure that its actions and decisions retain, restore, expand and optimise sustainability, ecosystem functioning and green infrastructure, and that such work is integrated into the City’s development path in order to adapt to climate change impacts and enhance carbon sequestration. The City will strongly discourage activities that damage, destroy, or reduce the sustainability or integrity of ecosystems and green infrastructure.”
What is green infrastructure? The City defines it as “An interconnected set of natural and constructed ecological systems, green spaces, and other landscape features that provides ecosystem services ... Green infrastructure provides services and functions in the same way as conventional infrastructure.”
While the City’s strategy on climate change appears to say green spaces should not be damaged or destroyed, the City planners obviously believe otherwise and are happy to see 18 buildings of up to 44m high squeezed onto a 14.7ha site.
3. With regard to climate-responsive urban development, the strategy states that “The City will strongly discourage urban development in areas of high climate risk and high environmental sensitivity or where ecosystem goods or services that support climate resilience would be significantly degraded or lost.” Yet, when the City’s own environmental scientists expressed their concerns about the loss of climate resilience caused by infilling the floodplain, they were simply ignored.
4. The City’s strategy also promises that they “…will adopt the precautionary principle – defined as a risk-averse and cautious approach that takes into account the limits of current knowledge about the consequences of decisions and actions.” However, in this case, it seems that despite warnings by the City’s own environmental scientists of the development negatively impacting on climate resilience, the City planners have ignored this principle by choosing to risk climate harms.
5. Further, as a long-term desired outcome, the City’s strategy envisions that “Cape Town’s natural ecosystems are protected, managed, and made resilient to enable these to act as effective buffers to climate change impacts and provide benefits of green infrastructure in support of current and future built infrastructure.” How much further away from this policy can the River Club redevelopment be when it infills a flood plain and river so that 150 000 square meters of concrete can be lain?
6. The Basic Assessment Report (the EIA process) did not commission a climate change impact study. Instead, after numerous appeals against the environmental authorisation highlighted the lack of attention to climate change, the developer commissioned a new consultant study purportedly to address climate change issues. This study did not ask the question as to whether a dense mixed-use development on the site was good for climate change mitigation but rather asked, and answered, how best the given design could adopt best carbon minimisation methods. That’s a different question. To build a new megacity on a floodplain doesn’t help the City mitigate its climate change impact when we have record high levels of office vacancies across Cape Town already. That’s dead space creating heat islands while a new concrete mini-city is being built on land intended in policy to be part of a coast-to-coast greenway. How is that climate change appropriate?
As Kevin Winter, lead researcher at UCT's Future Water Institute, recently noted “The current development at the River Club on floodplains of the lower Liesbeek suggests that very little has been learnt from a history of abuse of the river. The development is set to alter a conservation-worthy corridor and infill one of the last remaining sections of the Liesbeek River… future generations will regret that the authorities and private developers did not recognise the need to make room for the river, value the ecological services of a river that will mitigate climate change and secure water resources in the future.”
We asked Crispian Olver what he thought about the redevelopment in light of climate change challenges. He noted that there were “…very strong links between climate issues and the River Club development.” Extreme weather events and the increased risk of severe flooding change the required flood lines for developments. Yet, we know the developer’s hydrology reports used outdated sea level rise data and adopted conservative “business-as-usual” modelling. Given increasing climate change-induced variability in climate parameters, the appropriate scientific approach would have been to consider “black swan” events which are the occasional unexpected events with disproportionate impact. This was not taken into account in the City’s approval of plans for this redevelopment. We can therefore anticipate that, contrary to the developer’s assurances, flood waters will be pushed across into neighbouring areas.
There are many reasons for opposing the River Club redevelopment. Let’s remember at the close of the COP26 that many of those reasons relate to this development exacerbating the harms of climate change and reducing our City’s climate resilience.
We will not stop resisting this redevelopment. Join us for a Climate Change protest at the Liesbeek River Memorial Plaque (adjacent to the TRUP mound) at 3pm tomorrow, Friday 12th November 2021.
To achieve justice, we need your financial support to pursue our court challenge to stop this property redevelopment. We are scheduled to be in court on November 24th and 25th. Please consider assisting us with the legal fees. You can contribute at our fundraising website or directly via EFT here.
For more information, please visit our website and follow the Liesbeek Action Campaign on twitter: @LiesbeekAction.