The cheapest climate defence we have is in the ground

I have spent enough years on degraded grazing land and beside shrinking wetlands to recognise a pattern in how we talk about climate change in South Africa. The conversation tends to arrive late and be pitched high. We debate 2050 emission targets and global temperature thresholds while a farmer in the eastern Free State watches a wetland that once held water deep into winter dry out by August. Both conversations matter. Only one of them is deciding whether people have water to drink next year. Climate change is not a forecast in this country. It is a condition we are living through. Cape Town came within weeks of shutting off its municipal supply. Towns across the Eastern Cape have rationed water for years at a stretch. In 2022, the floods in KwaZulu-Natal killed more than 400 people and destroyed homes, roads and water systems in a single night. Rainfall is becoming less predictable, heat more punishing and the gap between a good season and a ruinous one narrower. Farmers feel it first. So do the rural households whose food, income and water depend on the land around them. For two decades, most of our climate effort and most of our climate funding has gone towards cutting emissions. That work is necessary, and South Africa carries real responsibility for it. But reducing emissions does nothing for the community facing a failed harvest or a flooded settlement. Adaptation, the work of helping people and systems cope with changes that are locked in, has been treated as the lesser priority. We can no longer afford that imbalance. The task in front of South Africa is less about how we slow the climate down and more about how we keep our footing while it shifts beneath us. Here is where I think we have undervalued something we own. Roughly half of the country’s surface water comes from less than a tenth of its land: the high-rainfall grasslands and mountain catchments that feed our major rivers. These are not empty spaces waiting for development. They are working infras