During his inauguration, President Cyril Ramaphosa highlighted the need for a swift and inclusive response to climate change, the writer says. Picture: State of Climate Action Report / PCC
As President Ramaphosa begins his second term, the urgency of addressing climate change has taken centre stage. During his inauguration, he highlighted the need for a swift and inclusive response to climate change, a crisis exacerbating South Africa’s challenges of poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
In 2020, the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) was established to oversee this ambitious response. The PCC’s first independent assessment, released to coincide with the start of the 7th Administration, offers a sobering overview of the climate impacts South Africa faces and the actions needed to mitigate these effects.
“Floods and droughts have ravaged different parts of our country in recent months, affecting the poorest and most vulnerable communities the most,” deputy chair of the PCC, Valli Moosa, said. The report underscores the increasing frequency of such climatic incidents, harming people, their homes, and their livelihoods.
Titled ‘The State of Climate Action in South Africa – Priorities for Action for the Government of National Unity’, the report reveals that despite South Africa’s strong commitments and public support for tackling climate change, progress is not occurring at the required pace and scale.
Key barriers include incoherent policies, weak governance structures, insufficient finance, and inconsistent actions by both the government and other stakeholders.
“South Africa needs access to scaled-up, new, additional and predictable, fit for purpose finance, specifically grant and concessional finance that can be deployed effectively to create enabling environments for rapid investments by buying down risks and creating new asset classes for clean investments that would allow for more significant mobilisation and leveraging of public and private finance,” the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment director-general (DG) Nomfundo Tshabalala said in a press release last week.
The report calls for urgent measures to reduce emissions and improve resilience, with a focus on four sectors: water, agriculture, energy, and transport. “This report is yet another clarion call for climate action and is unequivocal in its findings,” Moosa asserted.
In addition to assessing progress towards multiple priority indicators, the PCC interviewed over a dozen experts to substantiate findings and provide broader context.
The commission also conducted the first nationally representative survey on the just transition, together with the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), surveying more than 3,000 South Africans.
A significant finding from this survey is that while there is strong public support for climate action and the just transition, the actual implementation is lagging.
The report found that “there is a notable disparity between policy ambitions and practical outcomes. South Africa is often generally described as a policy-rich, implementation-poor country and this is equally true for climate action”.
The report highlights the need for stronger governance, better financing mechanisms, and more coherent policies to overcome these barriers. Looking forward, the PCC will continue to scrutinise and monitor implementation progress in detail, focusing on what is working, what is not, for whom, and why.
The intention is to produce a biennial State of Climate Action in South Africa report to provide comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information to enable change.
South Africa is entering a new and more challenging phase of climate action. The focus now must be on achieving the ambitious targets set.
“Strong government policies must drive a rapid response to climate change in a just manner that recognises, protects, and realises human rights and is supported by all stakeholders: businesses, civil society, labour unions, communities, and citizens,” Moosa emphasised.
The report concludes that the work of building a just transition should adhere to the three principles underpinning the Just Transition Framework: procedural justice, distributive justice, and restorative justice.
IOL