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05 July 2022 | Story Mandi Smallhorne
Cathedral Peak

Why mountain research matters 

“I don’t think South Africa is prepared for the possibility of a Gauteng Day Zero drought,” said Professor Francois Engelbrecht, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. 

Professor Engelbrecht was a keynote speaker at a session of the Southern African Mountain Conference 2022, held in the Drakensberg in mid-March this year and supported by, among others, the Afromontane Research Unit at the University of the Free State (UFS). The session, hosted by international network, GEO Mountains, looked at Long-term monitoring activities and associated data availability for climate change-related applications across Africa’s mountains: status quo and next steps.

The professor went on to say we came very, very close in the 2015-2016 drought, when the Vaal Dam dropped to 25% of capacity. Had it dropped just a bit more, to 20%, the most densely populated province in South Africa, our economic hub, would have been in serious trouble, as there would have been too little water to enable pumping the last dregs into the province.

What’s the link between a Day Zero event in Gauteng and data about mountain environments?

Think of the water towers that dot the Highveld landscape in Gauteng, very visible to residents of the suburbs. Mountains can be seen as massive ‘water towers’ that provide water to people hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres from their foothills. As Dr James Thornton of GEO Mountains, co-host of the session, explained, mountains provide a flow of ecosystem services; water provision is just one of them, but it is of critical importance. “The mountains are crucial for this, due to the orographic enhancement of precipitation.” The shape and topography of mountains (their orography), forces moist air upwards into cooler air at higher elevations – an effect called ‘orographic uplift’ – so that vapour held in the air condenses into water. 

So as moisture-laden air sweeps in from the warm Indian Ocean to the east of us, it encounters the upward thrust of the long Drakensberg chain of mountains, from the Eastern Cape through Lesotho and KwaZulu-Natal and on, up to the Wolksberg Mountains in Limpopo. The upward movement of the air into colder regions triggers precipitation – rain, mist, sometimes snow.

And that moisture, falling on the soil and rocks in cool mountain air, is also less likely to evaporate and return rapidly to the atmosphere, as it might do on the coastal plains and lowlands.

The result? The most obvious consequence is waterfalls glittering in the mountain cliffs and swollen streams rushing down the slopes. Look at maps and you’ll see rivers springing from mountain sources everywhere in the world, like the Tugela heading east and the Orange flowing west from the Drakensberg in South Africa and Lesotho, or the Ganges and Indus rising in the Himalayas and the Rhine and Rhône rising in the Alps.  

Mountain water also seeps into the ground, making its way through soil and rocks and recharging the groundwater within and beyond the mountains and their foothills. This recharge of the water table from high up in the mountains also contributes to streams and rivers that supply so much of our water needs, scientists have shown.  

Mountain water in Gauteng


Gauteng residents are well aware of the role of the Vaal River in the Vaal Water Supply System, but do we understand just how much of our water originates in the Drakensberg? According to the Water Research Commission “transfers from the Maloti Drakensberg (34.4%) and the Northern Drakensberg SWSA (18.9%)” are critical to our water supply. That’s a little more than half our water in Gauteng coming from the Drakensberg.

Engelbrecht and his co-authors wrote a few years ago: “Except for the Southern Cape, the Drakensberg is the single most important source of water in Southern Africa and supplies regions where the bulk of the population resides.” (The Drakensberg Escarpment as the Great Supplier of Water to South Africa, S.J. Taylor, et al, in Developments in Earth Surface Processes Volume 21, Mountain Ice and Water, Investigations of the Hydrologic Cycle in Alpine Environments.) But, they added, due to population growth and other pressures, “In South Africa, it is now expected that demand for water will exceed supply by 2025 if nothing is done to supplement current water resources.”

That in itself is reason enough to focus on monitoring our mountains, and to support scientists observing and gathering data there. But add that to Professor Engelbrecht’s prediction that “multiyear El Nino-type droughts may plausibly occur from the mid-century (2030-2060) onwards” due to the climate change crisis, and it’s clear that we desperately need to understand the detail of how our mountains provide us with water; we urgently need to understand what is changing in the mountains.

Research matters

The ongoing and rapid changes we’re seeing in these very sensitive environments, from changing precipitation patterns, to changing land-use, to increases in population, is why we really need to “monitor and track these changes, to understand the biophysical processes and their interaction with society, and to be able to better estimate the chance, for instance, of future extreme droughts on a more local scale so we can develop measures for mitigation and adaptation,” said Dr Thornton. Better management of upstream water resources – such as the massive ‘water tower’ in the Drakensberg and elsewhere – is one tactic we should be vigorously pursuing.

There is a paucity of data about our precious mountainous areas across the world, but especially in Africa, and one of the messages of this workshop and of the conference as a whole was the importance of not just doing the monitoring and gathering of data, but making it readily accessible to all. 

Dr Susan Janse van Rensburg (of the South African Environment Observation Network or SAEON, a national facility of the National Research Foundation) spoke about the in situ environmental monitoring that is being done in important mountain areas, including Cathedral Peak, the heart of the Central Drakensberg where the conference was being held. She introduced SAEON’s new Data Portal for researchers to access and share data about mountains – and not just in South Africa, but across the whole continent. 

Omar Seidu gave a presentation on an initiative called Digital Earth Africa which collates and curates satellite data – including data on mountains. And GEO Mountains itself runs inventories which “seek to identify, link up, and make accessible existing data and information resources across the world’s mountains”.

“We’re trying to make it straightforward for researchers on the ground to make their datasets available to anybody if they choose to do so,” said Dr Thornton.

Research, observations and data-gathering on the ground (and from satellites) is the foundation for intelligent analysis, which results in solid evidence that can guide policymakers and the public to make the best choices. Mountains, our water towers, have perhaps not been enough of a focus for society in the past; information about their vital role in something as basic as water provision, and better understanding of the processes that furnish us with water, will surely help us to both mitigate and adapt to a future in which water scarcity looms so large.

News Archive

School of Medicine – heartbeat of the UFS
2015-06-24

Photo: Charl Devenish

During the past year, the School of Medicine at the University of the Free State celebrated several successes in the field of research and cooperation agreements. These successes allow the school to continue delivering world-class teaching to some of the country’s top students.

Earlier this year, a research team from the Department of Medical Microbiology under the guidance of Prof Felicity Burt, received a grant of R500 000 to conduct research on Congo fever (CCHF). Prof Burt is an internationally-recognised expert on Congo fever. The funding that has been awarded will be used to profile immune responses against CCHF viral proteins, and investigate mechanisms and strategies to enhance these immune responses. This study may contribute to the development of a vaccine against this deadly virus.

Prof Stephen Brown from the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health’s expertise and commitment to paediatric cardiology gained him the title of Bloemfonteiner of the Year. Under the leadership of Prof Brown, the department has performed many breakthrough operations and procedures. The most recent of these, was the first hybrid procedure in the country which was performed in November 2014. The department also has an ultramodern hybrid heart catheterisation suite.
 
Prof William Rae from the Department of Medical Physics focuses on medically-applied radiation. Together with his department, they are looking at quantitative radiation dosages. The research is particularly crucial for the successful treatment of cancers. Through this research, it is possible to ensure that patients receive the appropriate radiation dosages in order to obtain the desired effect without the patient being affected negatively.

Dr Nathanial Mofolo, Head of the Department of Family Medicine in the School of Medicine, is since 2006 involved at various levels of hospital management regarding quality assurance, patient safety, clinical and infection management, as well as administration. He is currently curator of internal medical students for four of the UFS’s teaching hospitals. His department is currently focusing on the National Health Plan, HIV and tuberculosis, teaching and learning, as well as service delivery in family medicine.
 
Prof Francis Smit manages the team that, to their knowledge, decellularised the first primate heart. The method has been applied successfully on rat and pig hearts by researchers in America. Recently the team also successfully cultivated beating heart cells ? those of a rat ? in their laboratories. The research is in line with what researchers in Europe and America are working on. In the long run, the research project aims to attempt ‘building’ a heart that could be used for the purposes of organ donation.

The UFS is also home to the only metabolic research unit in the country. The unit was established to focus research on obesity, type II diabetes, metabolic bone diseases and all related diseases. This includes diseases such as diabetes, cholesterol, cancer, psoriasis, lymphoedema, fatigue, high blood pressure, gout, arthritis, fibrosis, skin disorders, PMT, migraine, insomnia, gall and kidney stones and related infections, and obstructive sleep apnea. The unit is a joint initiative between the UFS and Christo Strydom Nutrition. Mr Christo Strydom, a nutritionist and world renowned in the treatment of lymphoedema, invested R5 million in the establishment of this unit at the UFS.  Christo Strydom is also the founder and owner of Christo Strydom Nutrition.

The School of Medicine at the University of the Free State is the only unit on the continent offering in-depth modules in clinical simulation. The Clinical Simulation Unit on the Bloemfontein Campus of the UFS, headed by Dr Mathys Labuschagne, is regarded as the flagship unit of the school and boasts high-technology equipment where students can practice their clinical skills before applying those skills in the real world.
 

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