Climate Justice

Most of food production in Africa is shouldered by small scale farmers and the majority of farmers are women. Alarmed by the effects of climate change on her family’s farm Ayakha Melithafa from South Africa’s Western Cape joined an environmental school club and engages now in a national and an international youth movements for climate justice.

Major climate impacts and exorbitant costs have sounded the death knell for one of the last new proposed coal-fired power stations in South Africa: Thabametsi in water-scarce Limpopo.

With findings that neither the City of Cape Town nor the provincial government considered the full impact of development on the Cape Flats Aquifer in the Philippi Horticultural Area, the Cape High Court has sent two crucial decisions back for a second look.

During September, South Africa’s youth infotainment show, Politically Aweh, in partnership with Action 24 – Active Citizens for Responsive Legislatures, launched a video series on the climate crisis in Mzansi. With the recent femicides that shook the nation to xenophobic attacks and an unemployment rate of 29%, it’s understandably challenging for young South Africans to even think about climate change. However, as Goldman Environmental prize winner, activist and HBF partner Makoma Lekalakala points out in the video “You cannot have jobs on a dead planet.”

On Friday 20th September, thousands of South Africans joined the global climate strike to register their objections to the continuing destruction of the planet. Among them was HBF partner the Support Centre for Land Change (SCLC) who are fighting against fracking threats.

Just a few months ago, two cyclones (Kenneth and Idai) destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in parts of southern Africa. The cyclones, along with widespread drought, forced desperate people to migrate. But links between migrancy and xenophobia, violence against women and the growing climate crisis across southern Africa and well beyond have been largely neglected.

On Friday 20th September, thousands of South Africans joined the global climate strike to register their objections to the continuing destruction of the planet. Among them was HBF partner the Philippi Horticultural Area Food and Farming Campaign (PHAFFC) who are fighting to reverse a series of land use decisions that will render Cape Town anything but food, climate and water resilient.