South Africa’s Climate Ambitions Derailed by Incoherent Policies

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(Bloomberg) — South Africa is falling short of its ambitious targets and commitments to combat and prepare for climate change, an advisory body appointed by the nation’s president said.

The country may miss the emission-reduction targets it agreed to as part of an international treaty and deepen inequality in what is already the world’s most unequal nation, the Presidential Climate Commission said in a report entitled The State of Climate Action in South Africa released Thursday. 

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“South Africa has strong commitments toward tackling climate change and facilitating a just transition,” the body, which President Cyril Ramaphosa established in 2020, said in its inaugural report. “Incoherent policies, weak governance structures and mixed actions by social partners are hindering progress at the pace and scale required.”

The report comes at a time when South Africa, the world’s 15th-biggest producer of climate-warming greenhouse gases, is struggling to raise adequate finance to transition away from coal. 

The country has endured a series of heat waves, floods, storms and droughts that have ignited thousands of wildfires, killed hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars of damage. Climate disasters in South Africa usually hit its poorest communities hardest, with floods washing away the shacks of shanty-town dwellers and heat waves scorching the crops of subsistence farmers.

“South Africans are already experiencing widespread and, in some instances, devastating impacts of climate change,” the commission wrote in the 99-page report. “The country’s annual temperature has increased twice as fast as the global average since 1990 — and the number of rainy days across the country has significantly decreased, with more intense rainfall events and dry periods.”

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Most climate finance is spent on green-energy plants or mitigation, rather than on buttressing infrastructure and preparing the agricultural sector for the new reality, the commission said. 

Disagreements among policymakers about the pace of the transition away from coal, which accounts for four-fifths of South Africa’s electricity production and the bulk of its greenhouse gas emissions, and a shortage of finance are among the factors to blame for the lack of preparedness, it said.

The country sees investment of about 131 billion rand ($7 billion) annually, just more than a third of what’s needed to reduce emissions and adapt to a hotter climate with more violent weather, the commission said. 

While the country is on course to meet its 2025 targets for cutting emissions, as laid out in the government’s Nationally Determined Contribution submitted to the United Nations, a clutch of international assessments suggests it will fall short of its 2030 goal, the commission said.

That’s because of the slower-than-needed pace of renewable-energy expansion and national power utility, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., falling behind its schedule to shut down coal-fired power plants, the body said. 

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Between 1990 and 2020 South African emitted a greater volume of greenhouse gases than either France or Italy and fell just below South Korea, the commission cited research as showing. By last year, the country’s coal-power generation capacity was 6.7 gigawatts above what it had planned in 2019 and its renewable energy capacity was 5.2 gigawatts below target, it said. 

A survey of more than 3,000 South Africans showed that the strongest backing for the energy transition comes from a belief that it will reduce power outages, which have plagued the country since 2008, rather than concern about the environment, the commission said. That puts it at odds with results from similar surveys in Europe and Japan.

—With assistance from Julius Domoney.

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