Climate change does not rank high on the priority list of South Africans and many don't know what the just transition is.
South Africa has strong commitments and public support for tackling climate change and facilitating a just energy transition but progress is not happening at the pace and scale needed to “tackle a crisis of such proportion”.
This is the key finding of the Presidential Climate Commission’s (PCC) inaugural assessment of climate action, which blames incoherent policies, weak governance structures, insufficient finance and “inconsistent actions” by the government and other partners as the main barriers to progress.
The country is already grappling with the effects of climate change, the report said, warning that “detrimental climate impacts and risks are predicted to increase rapidly as we move toward the end of the 2020s and into the next decade”.
South Africa’s annual temperature has increased twice as fast as the global average since 1990 and the number of rainy days has significantly decreased, with more intense rainfall events and dry periods. These observed changes have led to numerous extreme climate-related events, including drought, floods and extreme heat.
The report said that 73% of households have reported to have been affected to some degree by extreme weather events over the past decade.
“At 1.25°C of warming above pre-industrial levels today, these events have already caused enormous damage to infrastructure, ecosystems, lives, and livelihoods, displacing thousands of people. They have also disproportionately impacted vulnerable groups, including women and young people, older people, the unemployed, historically marginalised groups and those living in informal settlements.”
Climate change exacerbates the country’s triple challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality, while the health effects from pollution caused by burning fossil fuels are acutely suffered by poorer people, worsening these inequities, it says.
Addressing climate change means strengthening adaptation measures to improve the resilience to immediate events (extreme weather and disasters) as well as long-term climatic shifts that affect water availability, food security and human health. Adjusting to a rapidly decarbonising global economy also needs ongoing and sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The scale of the crisis demands an “effective and well-equipped state” that enables trust and action among all stakeholders, the report said, noting that South Africa has increasingly prioritised a just transition, “with this agenda taking off at scale over the past five years”.
Commitments and action mismatch
Despite strong public support and policy commitments for acting on climate change and driving a just transition in South Africa, there is a disparity between policy ambitions and practical outcomes, the report said, adding that the country is generally described as policy-rich but implementation-poor country “and this is equally true for climate action”.
The main drivers behind this include contradictory public policies and positions, particularly regarding the future of the energy sector, “as the government wrestles with immediate trade-offs between energy security, economic growth, the health impacts of pollution from fossil fuels and climate commitments”.
The lack of consensus about the pace of the coal phaseout is delaying the implementation of necessary policy measures to prepare for and enable the transition, such as the draft 2023 Integrated Resources Plan, the Integrated Energy Plan and the South African Renewable Energy Masterplan.
Inadequate technical and financial capacity constrains the role of local governments as the frontline responders to climate change and the just transition, the report said. More than 60% of local municipalities are classified as dysfunctional because of resource constraints, structural problems, poor governance, ineffective and “sometimes corrupt financial and administrative management”, as well as poor planning and service delivery.
These municipalities should play a critical role in implementing and managing adaptation projects to improve community resilience, including disaster risk management strategies and early warning systems.
The third driver is limited investments in the just transition from public, private, international and domestic sources. Although climate and just transition finance flows have grown significantly in recent years, these still fall short of the country’s annual needs, especially for adaptation. Tracked annual climate finance reached R131 billion a year on average in 2019 to 2021, “an all-time high” but still far from the average annual estimated needs of R334 to R535 billion a year.
Climate resilience
The country’s vulnerability to climate change has steadily increased and its food and water sectors are the most vulnerable to climate change because of projected changes in its cereal yields, low capacity to acquire and use agriculture technology, existing water scarcity and limited dam storage capacity per capita, the report said.
Its readiness to leverage public and private investments for adaptation action has decreased because of social inequality, a comparatively complex business environment, and declining state capacity.
National policies and commitments have set out a comprehensive approach to building climate resilience, but the implementation has been “sluggish”, the report said, citing as an example, how only 28 of the 95 actions outlined by the national climate change adaptation strategy are listed as fully implemented or being implemented.
It said the broader systemic issues that hamper progress in the just transition also deter progress on building climate resilience.
“Within the existing policy framework, the institutional mandates and responsibilities to address climate change are not always clear, and coordination between actors is inadequate despite regular communications among at least some of the relevant government departments,” it said.
Many municipal officials tend to still view building climate resilience as additional to, rather than a fundamental element of their core responsibilities, which hinders the uptake of municipal climate change plans and strategies. Constrained municipal budgets also impede the implementation of adaptation and resilience-building initiatives.
Finance for climate adaptation lags significantly behind finance channelled toward mitigation (12% compared with 88%) and this means adaptation projects are unevenly distributed across South Africa, mostly concentrated in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
The race to reduce emissions
South Africa is the 14th-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and the largest emitter on the African continent. The production of coal-based electricity is the largest contributor to the country’s emissions, accounting for more than half of the country’s them.
The country’s greenhouse gas emissions increased during the 2000s, peaking in 2009 before decreasing during the 2010s, the report said. In 2022 it emitted an estimated 479 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2 e) — excluding forestry and other land-use changes — slightly lower than the emissions levels of 2000.
As a party to the Paris Agreement, South Africa is committed to the global goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit warming to well below 2°C while making best efforts to meet 1.5°C. South Africa has set targets for reducing these emissions by 2030.
The country’s revised nationally determined contribution (NDC) — efforts to reduce emissions — sets a commitment for national greenhouse gas emissions to be in the range of 398 to 510 MtCO2 e in 2025 and 350 to 420 MtCO2 e in 2030.
“External analysis shows that the lower end of the mitigation target in 2030 (that is, 350 MtCO2 e) almost aligns with a global trajectory of limiting warming to 1.5°C. South Africa has also set an aspirational goal for reaching net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, aims to submit an updated NDC … in 2025 in line with global agreements, setting updated and strengthened targets for 2030 and 2035.”
The report said strengthened emissions reduction targets will align with global imperatives for collectively reducing emissions while maximising local opportunities regarding a measured and planned transition “at a pace and scale South Africa can afford”.
South Africa is on track to meet its 2025 greenhouse gas emissions target and the low target of the 2030 NDC (350 MtCO2 e) “could be achieved with more ambitious actions in the electricity and transport sectors”.
Still, if key policies such as the 2019 Integrated Resource Plan with its prescribed electricity build and decommissioning plans are not achieved, the 2030 target in the NDC may not be achieved.
“This is pertinent given Eskom’s recent decision to further delay the decommissioning of three of its oldest coal-fired power plants (Camden, Grootvlei and Hendrina),” the report said.