Climate change, groundwater and intensive commercial farming in the semi-arid northern Sandveld, South Africa

Progress in the area of international climate negotiation has been the site of substantively increased activity of late, yet the task of utilizing appropriate spatial scale climate change projections to understand climate change impacts on sensitive sectors remains challenging. The study described here, undertaken in semi-arid south western South Africa, shows how downscaled climate change projections may be used to characterize climate change impacts in an area that is both valuable from a conservation point of view, yet at the same time serves as host to input intensive commercial agribusiness in the form of potato and rooibos tea production. Such potentially polarized land management objectives have given rise to initiatives to develop better practice guidelines for undertaking intensive commercial agriculture in a sensitive biodiverse environment. The study suggests that climate change may make the achievement of such better practice significantly more challenging. Climate change is here seen as one of a number of critically interacting multiple stressors affecting the area; including the trend to input-intensive farming and competing demands for water.