municipalities
comment
Fiona
Water Sewage and Effluent
[email protected]
Water Sewage & Effluent March/April 2016
debate
infrastructure
entering only the second year of a five- to
seven-year cycle. If this could happen
in Syria, what could drought cause in
a politically and economically fragile
region such as South Africa? We need to
hope it does not come to that.
South Africans are resourceful and
inventive. When the water crisis hit,
thousands of South Africans bought
bottled water and rushed it to those
places most affected. And local experts
have suggested that President Zuma’s
swopping-finance-ministers-quickerthan-underpants debacle was a tonic,
as it shocked the financial sector into
doing everything it could to stabilise the
economy.
The SA economy is complex,
diversified and very resilient, they say.
Let’s look to the better nature of all
South Africans and as the Minister of
Water and Sanitation has urged us to
do – let’s pray for rain, where it’s needed
most.
technology
n the six years before 2011, more than
half of Syria struggled under the most
devastating drought in its history. Syrian
president Bashar al-Assad did little to
help farmers and a million rural dwellers
lost their farms and livelihoods and
moved to cities already bursting at the
seams. In the different parts of Syria, the
problem worsened.
Discontent boiled, until a group of
teenage boys expressed their frustrations
against al-Assad’s repressive rule and
sprayed anti-regime slogans on the wall
of a school in Daraa. The crackdown
to this peaceful protest was swift and
angry – police beat and tortured the
boys. Soon after, Syrians in other cities,
already emboldened by the Arab Spring
flowering in other nations, gathered in
support of this spark of resistance and
protests spread like fire in dry bush,
following the path of the drought.
Five years later, the civil war rages and
the Syrian refugee crisis is often reported
as Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since
World War II. Did the drought play a
part in triggering this cruel, horrific civil
war? Prince Charles, Al Gore and Bernie
Sanders think so. Sanders really puts
his neck out on this one, by arguing that
climate change is “directly related to the
growth of terrorism”.
South Africa’s drought is naturally
affected by the El Niño cycle and we are
networking
I
industry
Could climate change have
started Syrian war?
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