South Africa’s short-term insurer, Santam, has partnered with the South African Weather Service (SAWS) to bolster the country’s defence against climate-related disasters.

The partnership will see the rollout of nine high-tech automatic weather stations across several provinces to improve early warning systems.

The first of four units were successfully piloted in Limpopo and Mpumalanga back in 2022.

As extreme weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable, the cost of inaction is rising.

In a strategic move to mitigate risk, Santam has funded nine automatic weather stations— aimed at giving South Africans more time to prepare before hazards turn into full-scale disasters.

The insurance company says lessons were learned from the recent floods in Limpopo, with over 300 million rand paid in claims.

The company’s head of strategy and investor relations, Thabiso Rulashe, says the investment will go a long way in helping vulnerable South Africans better plan for the harsh weather.

Santam’s Thabiso Rulashe says, “We do expect that the automatic weather stations that we’ve sponsored with South African Weather Services, they will really contribute to the of the observational gap that exists, which is essentially to improve the early warning system so that our society can respond a lot more better to the events, extremely weather events that we do face, to protect lives, to protect livelihoods and as well as the property. That’s really what we are expecting. The entire country should improve its own reliance in dealing with extreme weather events.”

In recent years, South Africa has experienced devastating weather-related disasters that have left many communities destroyed and displaced.

South African Weather Service’s Rudzani Malala says the multi-million-rand partnership with Santam seeks to find ways to reduce damage and economic losses, and to prevent deaths through the installation of the Automatic Early Warning System.

Malala says, “They’re going to play a very important and critical role in our focusing, in our early warnings, that will also assist in the improvement of accuracy, data availability. It’s very important that our early warnings are able to respond to the needs of the people and that we are able to save lives. The disasters that we have seen recently, they tell a story, I mean, from the KZN floods, the Eastern Cape floods, the Limpopo, and Mpumalanga floods. I think that already rings a bell that things are changing. We are experiencing that. Experiencing disasters, and they still have a nature of experiencing even more with the exacerbation from climate change.”

Santam has also raised concerns about an alarming number of South Africans without insurance, who often find themselves disadvantaged whenever disasters strike.

“Unfortunately, the publicly available stats tell us that we still have at least a better part, the majority of the country uninsured. I mean, that’s really a key challenge for our economy, and it is our endeavour, as part of this partnership, to make sure that we can make it easy for people to consider, communities to consider insurance. That’s still really a big challenge that exists. From Santams’ perspective, we continue to look and explore a bit more opportunities to have affordable insurance solutions. We had mentioned earlier that last year, we had launched and piloted a network solution for the small holder farmers, and that’s really to make insurance a lot easier and more affordable,” says Rulashe.

The South African Weather Service has also warned that the cold front that’s currently sweeping some parts of the country will continue well into winter, with more rain expected.

Video| Santam, South African Weather Service join forces: