Scorched is a stimulating read, mostly because of the author’s metaphoric and often poetic style of writing … More importantly, it makes you want to do something about global warming.

—Don Pinnock, Getaway Magazine

Scorched is a vivid journey through southern Africa’s mesmerising landscapes as climate change sets in. It wanders through the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands to capture the last faltering calls of a rain frog that was named after the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. The author pauses for thought following an elephant stampede to consider how savannahs might shift in an altered climate. She trails the wading birds of the West Coast into the high Arctic tundra for their annual breeding season before returning to a Cape which is crisping over as drought continues to grip the province.

Another world exists somewhere beyond the global politicking of superpowers and petrostates. This is the place where a solitary bee continues to pollinate the pale, demure flower of an orchid near Darling, or where the limey coral skeleton hosts its colourful algae on a Sodwana reef. These plants and animals – many of which are unique to the region – continue to do what their ancestors have done for millions of years. Yet the world is shifting its shape around them. In places it is warming and drying, elsewhere the rains come in greater deluges. Some are abandoned by the other plants and animals with which they have cohabited, as species retreat before the onslaught of rising greenhouse gases and altered weather patterns.

Scorched gives powerful local colour to a global problem. It ponders the morality of the changes humankind has wrought, and the future of life as we know it.

Leonie Joubert is a freelance writer. Scorched: South Africa’s Changing Climate and Invaded: The Biological invasion of South Africa were awarded honorary Sunday Times/ Alan Paton Awards. Boiling Point: People in a Changing Climate, is based on research funded by teh 2007 Ruth First Fellowship.