High summer is fire season in South Africa’s Western Cape province. Nothing strange about that – the vegetation is dry, the winter rains long gone, and, well, that’s the way the spectacular fynbos likes it.
The plants of the biodiverse Cape Floral Region, the world’s smallest floral kingdom and a world heritage site, have evolved to rely on fire for their life cycles. Some proteas need fire’s chemical bouquet to trigger their buds or the heat to pry open their seeds, while ericas germinate in response to clouds of smoke. The most beautiful flowers emerge from bulbs after fire – some of them edible. The Khoisan knew this and used fire to encourage a good crop of bulbs to eat.
Having co-evolved with fire, the fragrant oils in many fynbos plants are highly flammable. You can smell the pungent salvias and sharp buchus when out walking on a hot day. So, when a few sparks fly, it’s easy for an entire mountainside to go up in flames.
But combustible alien vegetation and insufficient burning of swathes of fynbos bordering urban areas have added to the natural fire load. And then, of course, there’s the inconvenient but unavoidable fact of climate change, adding heat and aridity to the long lazy days of summer.
In December and January, there were almost 6,500 fires in the Western Cape. The Kluitjieskraal fire, which started near Wolseley, incinerated 28,154 hectares of vegetation (day 12 figures from Working on Fire) in the Breede River valley – 6,000 of them in just 12 hours. The largest fire footprint so far this year, it took two weeks, 730 firefighters, and 14 aircraft to bring under control. In the process, it destroyed 44 structures and shut down the iconic Bainskloof Pass, designed by Scottish roads engineer Andrew Geddes Bain and built by crews of convict labour to link the towns of Wellington and Ceres in 1854. Fires raged up and down the Cape Peninsula too – Simonstown, Fish Hoek, Kalk Bay, not to mention smaller but still devastating fires in several informal settlements.
Fierce temperatures and strong dry winds have complicated things for firefighters. A 2023 study found that extreme fire weather conditions have become almost twice as likely in the Cape Town area due to climate change.
Flying back to the Highveld in early February after a short visit to the Cape, fires are still raging out of control up in the mountains of the Cape Winelands. As the aircraft climbs, I see how parched the earth below is, as though beseeching for rain. But this is normal in the Western Cape in February – most of the rain falls in winter, and the extensive wheat fields have dried post-harvest.
The scale of removal of the lowland fynbos and renosterveld is not – or should not be – normal, but it is what has been for some time. There are no hedgerows here, and fields are planted right to the very edge of land parcels, avoiding only steep slopes or rocky outcrops. I remember a conservationist from Cape Nature telling me years ago that when he looks at an aerial photograph of the plains of the wheat-growing Swartland, he sees complete ecological devastation. Objectively, you cannot argue with this.
Despite the good rains in the 2023 winter, it has only taken three months of hotter and dryer weather – November was one of the hottest on record for Cape Town – for fire conditions to significantly worsen.
Residents of Pringle Bay, a small community hugging the coast to the east of Cape Town, in the shadow of Cape Hangklip, were ordered to evacuate twice in one week as January turned into February – first on the Tuesday, and then again on the Thursday as the Hangklip fire roared up once more. There were multiple fires burning from Hangklip east along the coast to Kleinmond. I can imagine the unease engendered in the locals by the wind and smoke and constant noise of helicopters. The fire left a charred and ashen landscape, devoid of life.
Climbing higher, and now further north, ethereal strands of a dusky shade drift past the plane’s window. The smoke is still with us, accompanying the aircraft as it edges towards the Karoo. I look down and see rough spheroid shapes glinting through the pall – the farm dams are full. Across the province, reservoirs are at 69%, and even Beaufort West, for a change, is doing okay with the Gamka Dam 77% full in late February. In the Eastern Cape, an almost 10-year drought ended in October 2023 with bumper rains.
But the abundant surface water I see will not make any difference to the longer-term trends. The weather in the Western Cape – and across most of South Africa – is becoming hotter and drier. So, the conditions that favour more fires and drive up their intensity will only increase. Climate change’s double whammy of increased flooding, from the super-charged hydrological system, comes into play as well: fire-stricken areas of the Cape Winelands were hit by severe flooding in June and September. One of the knock-on effects was damage to gravel roads that hampered the fire services’ access to remote areas. And, of course, steep slopes denuded of vegetation from fierce fires lead to rivers of erosion when heavy rains fall.
In the short term, better wildfire risk management can make a big difference – particularly in the wildland-urban interface. Removing tall flammable alien trees and controlled burning of fynbos in calm weather can reduce the fuel load. Maintaining fire breaks and ramping up investment in firefighting staff and equipment – already draining local authority budgets – are essential.
2023, the hottest year on record, was also a record year for global wildfires. It included the deadliest wildfire in the United States in 100 years – the devastating Lahaina fire on Hawaii, a Canadian fire season that burned through 18.5 million hectares, exceeding the 10-year average by a factor of six, and fires that blazed across North Africa, killing 65 people in Algeria alone. As the global fire toll increases, so do the associated carbon emissions.
With two more months of Cape fire season to go, there will be no respite for firefighters and local authorities. Not this year, and not in the future. Yesterday, the South African Weather Services warned of extremely high fire danger conditions in five provinces – including the Western Cape where conditions are ‘very hot to extremely hot and uncomfortable’.
As the fire season races on, it may exceed the toll of the 2014/2015 season that destroyed over 130,000 hectares. I can only echo the headline in a Sunday Times article two days ago: fire is indeed the future of the Western Cape.