Climate Justice

For decades, South Durban's communities have shared their neighbourhood with two of the country’s biggest oil refineries. As some of the estimated 20,000 South Africans killed by air pollution every year, they now must also contend with flooding and storms.

Southern Africa is heating at 2°C per century, twice the global average. In the Northern Cape, as elsewhere, Climate change is no longer a future event, but a daily reality. Since 2015, a climate change induced drought has wrought devastating economic, social and political consequences: agriculture is collapsing, and both emerging and commercial farmers are abandoning their farms.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF) Cape Town Office, in cooperation with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), would like to offer South African civil society organisations the opportunity to work with the Sustainable Asset Valuation (SAVi) tool. 

The massive floods that hit KZN, and Durban in particular, in April 2019 are yet another indicator of how climate change is affecting our resilience. While President Cyril Ramaphosa recently acknowledged this, there has been a strange silence since, and big, carbon-intensive programmes are steaming ahead in the port city. Surely the time for talking is over?

In the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement adopting “well below 2°C” as the international goal to limit global warming, geoengineering is increasingly being promoted as a technological means to counteract climate change or its effects. This article unpacks the state of play of these technologies in South Africa.

The water crisis has thrust the Cape Town population into a major panic. For some, this is the first we find ourselves under such circumstances. However, Cape Town has faced severe water shortages before. This is the second major water crisis to hit the city in a 100 years.

  Despite its importance and uniqueness, the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) has come under threat from inappropriate urban and industrial development. To this end, the City of Cape Town started a process of rezoning the area from an agricultural land use to industrial in order to accommodate the planned development.  

This documentary follows the experiences of urban farmers and food gardeners in townships in and around Ekhuruleni, East of Johannesburg as they attempt to deal with the challenge that is climate change. The aim of the documentary is to raise awareness around how climate change is affecting people’s livelihoods as it pertains to the growing phenomenon of food insecurity in South Africa.