Sustainable Development

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 South Africa, a severe water crisis, fuelled by climate change, laid bare the hyperbole of “a well-run, global best practices, World Design Capital bla bla” Cape Town. Instead of relying on window dressing, Cape Town should learn from cities that are serious about climate change mitigation and adaptation. Nazeer Sonday argues that we have the farmers, and a population concerned about its food. What we lack is political leadership.

On the 7th of February 2019, the French energy company Total announced a ‘significant gas condensate discovery’ some 175 kilometres off the southern coast of South Africa. The find was described by Total, as ‘a new world-class gas and oil play’.On the very same day South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, stated during his annual State of the Nation Address, that the find ‘could well be a game-changer for our country and will have significant consequences for our country’s energy security and the development of this industry’. This brief report critically evaluates these claims and assesses its likely environmental effects.

Eskom hike wipes out R80 increase on pensioners’ old-age grants.

High poverty, unemployment, inequality could be addressed by small-scale farming – campaign.

For 200 years we've been building a gigantic worldwide machine for permanent economic growth.

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.