Energy Minister Dipuo Peters threw her weight behind fracking ahead of her department’s budget vote speech in Parliament on Thursday. The minister said it was her “hope and wish” that the final report into fracking for shale gas in the Karoo indicated that reserves could be extracted and exploited safely should they be proven. “It [...]

Cape Town – Fynbos, a vegetation found only in the Western Cape, is under serious threat from climate change, according to recent findings by a team of scientists. University of Cape Town professor Michael Meadows and others found that winter rainfall for the province would decrease as the planet warmed due to a build-up of [...]

You get home from work, close your door to the cold and switch on your favourite soapie. Your husband begins cooking dinner, the kids start running a hot bath. You switch on a heater and put a load of dirty washing in the machine. It’s this type of behaviour that triggers power shortages and outages [...]

Cape Town – Water engineers are poised to up the treatment rate of overflowing acid mine drainage (AMD) in the Witwatersrand’s western basin, an official said on Wednesday. “The first train is operational at the western basin, treating 10 megalitres a day,” water affairs chief operations officer Trevor Balzer said in Cape Town. “By early [...]

Two decades of high rainfall have masked South Africa’s traditional water scarcity. To solve looming problems the country will have to work with its neighbours to share water and agriculture resources, as well as reallocate its internal resources. Traditionally, South Africa has 15-year wet and dry cycles. The general trend indicates that the next dry [...]

Cape Town – There is “merit” in carrying out some hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for shale gas in the Karoo, Environmental Affairs Director General Nosipho Ngcaba said on Wednesday. “It does seem there is merit, from our own perspective as a department, on exceptional experimental work that would have to be undertaken under highly-controlled conditions,” [...]

A group of environmentalists today begin walking the 265km length of the Umgeni River to raise awareness about the plight of South African rivers through a campain dubbed “Mayday for rivers”. Organised by the Duzi Umgeni Conservation Trust (Duct), the walk is starting at Umgeni vlei – the plateau above Dargle and Fort Nottingham – [...]

Southern African countries on Wednesday agreed to launch a centre to tie together climate change studies across the region. South Africa, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Namibia signed a declaration to launch the Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management in the Namibian capital Windhoek. Set up with €50-million in German [...]