On Sunday President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed ministers from his ANC party and the pro-business opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) to serve in his “government of national unity”.

In one of the most significant changes, Ramaphosa took away pro-coal minister Gwede Mantashe’s control of the energy sector. Hilton Trollip, a Cape Town University energy researcher, told Climate Home that Mantashe had previously “paralysed” the government’s renewables programme.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy has now been split in two. Mantashe is only keeping control of mining and hydrocarbons, while the ANC’s Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, previously the electricity minister, will now be in charge of setting energy policy with a wider mandate. 

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Trollip said it was unclear if Ramokgopa would boost renewables as he has not held much power until now. But there is now a better chance that Mantashe’s highly contentious Integrated Resource Plan – which envisages a slowdown in renewable energy investments and a switch to gas-fired power – will be revised, he added.

DA’s Dion George is the new environment minister replacing Barbara Creecy, who has been moved to transport.

Creecy played an active role in several COP climate talks, most importantly successfully proposing a global goal on adaptation at COP26 in 2021. 

JETP talks

Owing to its heavy reliance on coal for electricity, the country is Africa’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. 

That made it a prime candidate for a world-first funding agreement, backed by wealthy nations, aimed at ramping up investments in clean energy while also protecting those reliant on the fossil fuel sector.

But two and a half years after it was announced, the now $9.3 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership” (JETP) has made little tangible progress on the ground. 

Meanwhile, as the country grapples with rolling blackouts, state-owned utility Eskom has announced plans to delay the decommissioning of at least three of its coal-fired power plants by several years  – raising the risk that funding partners will walk back on their offers.

A general view of Kendal Power Station, a coal-fired station of South African utility Eskom, in the Mpumalanga province. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko

Kevin Mileham, the DA’s shadow minister of mineral resources and energy, told Climate Home that South Africa’s JETP “will need to be accelerated” as the country is currently not on track to meet global climate goals.

The party wants to see “a rapid roll out” of the programme which will require improved dialogue with the wealthy European and North American countries funding part of it, he added.

It also wants to advance the implementation of a climate change adaptation strategy and believes South Africa needs to do a better job at tracking and reporting its efforts to reduce carbon emissions, Mileham said.

Much of the progress will hinge on the government’s ability to form a united front on foreign policy and forge an effective relationship with the international funding partners.

The ANC and DA have regularly clashed on international affairs, such as the country’s support to Palestine.

They will need to “reconcile their differences [on foreign policy] and come to a shared understanding on international multilateral processes,” says Happy Khambule, energy and environment policy director at Business Unity South Africa, a business lobby group.

Tensions over private sector role

He added that private companies, which will have a significant role in the transition, want to see policy certainty enhanced in the months ahead.

The group is awaiting the finalisation of the Electricity Regulation Amendment Bill, which promises to open up the electricity market and put an end to Eskom’s longstanding monopoly, and the Integrated Resource Plan.

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Meanwhile, the DA’s preference for greater private sector involvement in the energy transition could create fresh tensions with key stakeholders. Left-wing adversaries often deridingly label the DA a “neoliberal” party.

The country’s largest trade union group COSATU wants the newly separated energy department to “stop the privatisation of electricity and energy”, and instead promote state and social ownership models.

“We don’t expect major shifts with regards to the just transition, but rather a more focused approach on its implementation, in particular to make sure workers and communities and value chains are not left behind,” a spokesperson for the organisation told Climate Home.

The just transition should be overseen by multiple government departments given “the triple crisis” of unemployment, climate change and energy shortages, they added, suggesting that, for example, the finance ministry should raise spending on climate-focused public employment schemes.

(Reporting by Nick Hedley, editing by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini)

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Achieving this aim would mean tens of billions more dollars flowing into adaptation projects. This huge – but achievable – feat would be immensely beneficial for communities around the world suffering from regular extreme weather events.

Alongside his call for greater adaptation finance, Guterres outlined five priorities for the sector, one of which was making it easier to access funding, especially for the vulnerable.

If billions are going to be spent on helping countries adapt to climate change, we need to make sure the money is reaching the people who need it the most. This is where the concept of locally led adaptation (LLA) comes in. The term refers to the central importance of providing frontline communities with the power and resources to respond to the climate crisis.

The Adaptation Fund was among the first group of international organisations to endorse a set of principles on locally led adaptation during COP25 in 2019. These principles cover everything from devolving decision-making to addressing inequalities, from providing predictable funding to ensuring the whole process is open and transparent. The principles have since been endorsed by over 100 organisations, including government ministries, global charities and development agencies.

This new model sets the scene for how current and future climate adaptation should be implemented. The focus is on an inclusive approach which puts communities most affected by climate change at the heart of how decisions are made.

Putting words into practice

The Adaptation Fund has been applying the principles of locally led adaptation for over a decade. The fund’s direct access scheme allows national organisations based in the countries they serve to manage all elements of a project, from design to monitoring.

The fund pioneered its first enhanced direct access (EDA) projects in 2014, taking direct access a step further in empowering national institutions to identify and fund local adaptation projects. This led the fund to establish an EDA funding window in 2021, and in April 2024, it went one step further by creating dedicated finance streams to support locally led adaptation.

The fund believes this new approach makes it “the first multilateral climate fund that has fully operationalised the global LLA principles,” it said in a press statement.

“The Adaptation Fund has a rich history of innovating and evolving to respond to countries’ urgent adaptation needs. Over several years, the fund has continued to offer more opportunities to vulnerable countries through diverse funding windows beyond its regular projects,” Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the organisation, told Climate Home.

“Creating these dedicated funding windows to support locally led adaptation will open even more opportunities for vulnerable countries to enhance capacity building by offering local governments, NGOs, community organisations, indigenous groups, young entrepreneurs and a broad range of local actors the opportunity to develop and implement sustainable adaptation actions directly,” he added.

Tailored solutions

One of the pioneering locally led adaptation projects the fund supported took place in South Africa from 2015 to 2020. On opposite ends of the country, two districts – Namakwa in the Northern Cape and Mopani in Limpopo – are subject to the same extreme weather: hotter temperatures with more intense dry and wet spells. These more uncertain, dangerous conditions put ever greater pressure on fragile local communities.

The pilot project was implemented by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It was intended to strengthen local institutions to adapt to these new climate realities, and provided funding to 12 ‘small grant recipients’ – groups based in the region and with an intimate understanding of how the communities work.

Investments were made after vulnerability studies were conducted and tailored solutions created to meet local needs. The ambition of these groups was simple – to ensure resources went to people most vulnerable to climate change. A raft of innovative solutions were then implemented, from rainwater harvesting and solar pumps, to cooling sheds and bio-gas digesters.

‘Considerable impact’

“The reach and positive impact on people’s livelihoods and adaptive capacity through assets, learning and networks was considerable,” the project’s evaluation report concludes, adding that the focus on careful, appropriate investment “has significantly improved the lives of those directly, and indirectly connected with the projects.”

Mandy Barnett, SANBI’s chief director for adaptation policy, told Climate Home that one lesson from the project was a need to develop trust and effective relationships with people on the ground.

“We learned what we should do and what we shouldn’t do in terms of getting climate finance to the right people,” she added, noting that communicating expectations, from the funder downward, was key.

“A wider challenge is the need to translate climate science into local concerns. We want to empower people to make informed decisions, and to do this requires you to invest time and resources into capacity building,” she added.

New opportunities

The South African project helped pave the way for the many LLA schemes the fund is now supporting around the world. Fast forward to 2024 and a range of new proposals have just been approved which puts decision-making powers into the hands of local institutions.

They include a Peruvian project to support water, agriculture and food security; a Rwandan project to build climate resilience in rural areas; and in Belize, a plan to restore ecosystems and livelihoods battered by climate-related disasters. What these projects have in common is not only a plan to fight climate change, but one where the tools and resources are under local control.

“These new LLA windows take a significant step forward in providing an opportunity to directly lead and develop adaptation projects on the ground and accelerate effective, scalable actions worldwide in the process,” said Ollikainen.

The way forward

On World Environment Day this June, the UN Secretary-General took the opportunity to speak up about adaptation finance again. He highlighted how the last 12 months have been the hottest on record. “For every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only about 5 cents is available,” he said.

The most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that, in 2022, $115.9 billion was raised for climate finance, the first time this target has been achieved. Adaptation finance made up $32.4 billion of the total, a way off the 50% goal endorsed by the UN head, but still three times higher than what it was in 2016.

Where this money is spent will determine how vulnerable regions can survive the impacts of climate change in the coming years. But as more locally led adaptation projects are rolled out, affected communities will finally have a direct say in how that happens.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Finance flowing for locally led climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

But they warned the South African government should not row back from a clear commitment to cutting long-term emissions.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told Parliament last week the timetable to shift away from coal “must be relooked at” while the country struggles with crippling daily blackouts.

The US, UK, EU, Germany and France are contributing funds for a landmark plan, known as a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JetP) to clean up South Africa’s coal-reliant electricity system.

Local business group tries to keep South Africa’s coal plants alive

A spokesperson for the German development ministry told Climate Home the group of rich countries behind the JetP show “understanding for the current emergency and sees the need for short-term measures” in South Africa.

But they also warned against backsliding on the coal to clean energy transition: “A clear commitment by the South African government to long-term emission reduction strategies is and remains an important component of our cooperation”.

Uncertain plans

The programme hinges on the ability to replace most of its 14 existing coal power plants with solar and wind power.

South Africa’s coal plants often produce less electricity than the country needs and state-owned energy firm Eskom respond by implementing planned power cuts, which it calls load shedding.

These can last up to 10 hours and have significantly worsened over the last year, angering citizens and businesses and damaging Ramaphosa’s popularity ahead of elections next year.

Ageing and unreliable coal-fired power plants frequently breaking down and Eskom’s dire financial situation have been blamed for the crisis.

Now the government is considering delaying the closure of further coal power plants to help ease electricity cuts.

“Our own pace”

Rampaphosa told the National Assembly last week that “we will transition to cleaner energy but at our own pace and own time”.

“We have got to do it, taking into account the needs of our people and the requirements of energy security”, he added.

Alongside the closure and repurposing of coal-fired power plants, the partnership is also meant to cover an expansion of social protection and retraining for workers who lose their jobs.

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But an investigation by Climate Home News and Oxpeckers found coal-reliant communities have scarce details on how funds for re-skilling will be invested.

The uncertain prospects are fuelling hostility to the programme in coal heartlands. A proposal from a business group to keep coal power plants alive is gaining support from local politicians and some residents, Climate Home News has found.

Debt concerns

The type of financing offered has been another continuing sticking point in the rich nations partnership with South Africa.

Grants make up only 3% of the package. The rest is loans, raising concerns South Africa’s debt burden.

Just over half of the funding is earmarked as concessional loans, with better-borrowing terms than South Africa can access on the open market.

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Like South Africa, Germany has kept coal plants open for longer than it wanted because of a short-term crisis.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany and the rest of Europe sought to drastically reduce their reliance on Russian gas.

To ensure that the supply of electricity met demand over the winter of 2022, Germany temporarily re-opened two coal power plants. Overall though, the crisis has sped up Europe’s transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.

The post Rich nations “understanding” of South African delay to coal plant closures appeared first on Climate Home News.

Nelly Sigudla, a qualified fire watcher and part-time control room operator at Duvha power station in Mpumalanga, South Africa’s energy capital, worries for her future, when her main source of income gets unplugged.

The mother of four children lives in Benicon Park, an informal settlement next to the coal-fired power station, which is scheduled to be decommissioned by Eskom – South Africa’s public electricity company – between 2031 and 2034.

Like many employees in the coal-mining industry, Sigudla fears her qualifications won’t be enough in the near future, when renewables take over coal as South Africa’s primary source of new energy, risking becoming unemployable.

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The country, which depends on coal for about 85% of its electricity, is home to one of the largest energy experiments in the world: an $8.5-billion deal with a group of rich nations – including the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union – to transition towards renewable energy.

For solar panels and wind turbines to operate, South Africa will have to redirect coal workers towards new jobs in the renewable energy sector, such as construction, electrical engineering and information technology.

But an investigation by Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism and Climate Home News found a major skills gap in coal-reliant communities and a lack of clarity on how funds for reskilling will be implemented.

Sigudla said the transition to green energy sources in Mpumalanga is difficult to welcome. From a community perspective it could bring even more poverty. The region has a soaring unemployment rate of 38%, and more than 100,000 jobs depend on coal.

“When the renewable sector kicks in, what fire am I going to watch?” Sigudha asks. “No one has come to the communities to tell us about new skills programmes that we can follow to acquire skills that will be needed in future.”

Reskilling programmes

The Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET-IP), a document that is guiding South Africa’s move to renewables, includes an investment of nearly R2.7-billion ($151 million) for reskilling programmes across the country.

In Mpumalanga, R750-million ($42 million) is allocated to “investing in youth” – including education, training, work experience and placements – and R5.6-billion ($310 million) to “caring for coal workers”, which includes re-skilling, redeployment, placement and temporary income support.

Funds would not only come from the JET partnership, but also from government budgets, venture capital and multilateral banks.

According to the JET-IP, the government plans to set up a national skills hub to advise on reskilling needs, and R1,6-billion ($89 million) will be allocated to creating pilot training centres known as “skills development zones” in Mpumalanga, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape provinces.

These pilot zones will be run by technical colleges and support the development of new skills and courses, aiming to “ enhance the employability of graduates”, says the JET-IP.

One of the options to set up facilities for the training centres is to use old decommissioned coal plants. This was one of the options for the Komati power station, the first one to shut down, in October 2022, according to a recently published report by environmental justice organisation GroundWork.

But details about how these training centres would actually become operational are scarce.

Development zones

Blessing Manale, spokesperson for the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC), an independent multi-stakeholder body established by President Cyril Ramaphosa to oversee the country’s transition, was unable to indicate when the skills development zones will start operations.

Additionally, he acknowledged that skills development is severely under-prioritised, adding “all stakeholder groups have raised this as a fundamental weakness in the JET-IP”.

“In the PCC’s view, much work needs to be done, both to quantify the needs for skills development, and to upskill the workforce and new entrants – in particular youth and young women,” Manale said.

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Manale added the transformation of technical and vocational colleges, typically aimed at adults looking for new technical skills, is “fundamental”. The PCC is rolling out a new programme on skills for the energy transition along with the departments of education and energy, he said. 

But there needs to be more clarity on the skills needed for the decommissioning of coal-fired plants, he said.

“This gives rise to questions around who will actually provide the training required for upskilling workers in the coal value chain, design curricula for educational institutions where skills development will take place, and how this can be funded,” Manale told Oxpeckers.

For workers in the coal industry such as Nelly Sigudla (above), the transition to green energy sources in Mpumalanga is difficult to welcome. (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Vocational training

Mpumalanga has three technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges that fall under the department of higher education and training (DHET). They focus on “preparing students to become functional workers in a skilled trade”.

These colleges, based in Ehlanzeni, Gert Sibande and Nkangala districts, provide practical skills training for the mining and fossil fuel industries, among other courses. At the start of the year, the department reported that more than 500,000 students had enrolled at TVET colleges countrywide.

Oxpeckers and Climate Home reached out via email to all three TVET colleges, as well as the DHET and several other tertiary institutions in the province, to understand how skills development courses currently on offer could be applicable to the green energy sector. Similar questions were also sent to Eskom’s Academy of Learning and the South African Renewable Energy Technology Centre. Despite follow-up phone calls, no responses were received at the time of publication.

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The curricula of the TVET colleges and other educational facilities needs to change to achieve the energy transition, said professor Victor Munnik, co-author of the Contested Transition report recently released by GroundWork.

Training and reskilling for renewables must be “fit for purpose”, he said. “It should be aimed at a society that lives on renewable energy and understands how it works. There are specific specialised skills involved; for example, for the grid to become a smart grid it has to integrate a lot of IT technologies.”

Changes in the education system need to include school courses “to prepare young people not just to work in the new economy but to actively shape it and be part of it”, Munnik said.

Wendy Poulton, secretary general of the South African National Energy Association, added that there is a scarcity of specialist technical and managerial skills in the renewable energy sector. “This will require the education, training and upskilling of engineers and technicians to shift into renewables,” she said.

Happy Sithole, NUM health and safety chairperson in the Highveld region and an Eskom shop steward, says he has no knowledge of skills development zones in Mpumalanga. (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Union concerns

The regional chairperson of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in the Mpumalanga Highveld region, Malekutu Motubatse, is concerned that the current courses offered at TVET colleges and other education facilities still produce learners that will be unemployed in the near future.

Next to each power station there is a coal mine that is used for the purpose of providing coal to the power station, he said. “So the reskilling should be a reskilling of everyone. If the government is talking about reskilling, who is going to be reskilled, Eskom employees or mine employees? Let’s assume that it talks to Eskom employees, then where does it leave the coal mine workers?”

Happy Sithole, NUM health and safety chairperson in the Highveld region and an Eskom shop steward, believes not many artisanal coal miners - who conduct small scale mining - will be employed in the renewables sector.

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“We are talking about artisans, a job that pays well. If you change from coal to renewables, what’s going to happen to them?”

Sithole said he has no knowledge of skills development zones in Mpumalanga: “We find ourselves trying to understand what this is, because as NUM we have not seen any development.”

NUM is also unaware of a training facility that is supposed to be set up at Komati power station, which was decommissioned in October 2022 and is punted as a model for repurposing, Sithole said.

“We have not heard of Komati becoming a training facility. All we know about Komati is that there is intent to demolish it. There’s a lot of information that needs to be cleared up, and it’s difficult to get answers,” he said.

Gaylor Montmasson-Clair, a senior economist at Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS), an economic research institution, said Eskom’s skilled workforce has a higher chance of finding alternative jobs in other industries, such as electricians, for example.

But coal miners might not have the same luck. “To be blunt, we must stop the delusion that the bulk of the people who are employed in coal mining are going to be employed in renewable energy. That narrative just makes no sense,” Montmasson-Clair said.

Duvha power station, located in Mpumalanga, South Africa, is scheduled to be decommissioned between 2031 and 2034. (Photo: Ashraf Hendricks)

Construction jobs

Peter Venn, chief executive of Seriti Green, said the transition will create more jobs in the construction sector in the coming years. “We see a positive job growth in the renewable space for the next 10 years through the construction period,” he said.

Seriti Green is an offshoot of a mining company and will soon begin construction on South Africa’s largest wind farm in Mpumalanga, with power supply due to come online by 2025.

With Seriti being on both sides of the transition from coal mining to renewable energy supply, Venn emphasises the importance of training programmes for the skills required in the renewable sector.

“The Cape Peninsula University has partnered with Komati power station and Eskom to deliver skills in Mpumalanga. And there are other organisations offering significant renewable energy skills,” he said.

“Renewables require across-the-spectrum skills. All the back-office skills are required, civil and electrical skills are required; it goes into IT, security, data analytics, preventative maintenance,” Venn said.

Middelburg resident Emanuel Marutle says the current education system is not even able to provide skills for learners to work in the coal-mining sector, making a transition towards renewables even more difficult.  (Photo: Ashraf Hendriks)

Young workers

According to the PCC, workers in the coal-mining sector are relatively young, with a median age of 38 years. About 90% of those employed in Mpumalanga are semi-skilled (74%), or low-skilled (17%) workers.

The urgency for the skills they will need to diversify is heightened by the fact that transition planning is developing in the context of already high unemployment, poverty and inequality, the PCC says.

“These dynamics make skills diversification more complex as the just transition ought to manage job losses and create employment opportunities in a country with an unemployment rate of 33.9%,” said Manale.

Emanuel Marutle, a resident of the coal fields in Middelburg, told Oxpeckers he is worried the education system in Mpumalanga doesn’t have the resources to help affected community members gain practical skills to weather the transition.

“The current education system is not even able to provide skills for learners to work in the coal-mining sector, so how will it equip people with the skills needed in the renewables sector?”

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Marutle said during a community consultation about the transition held “by government people from Johannesburg” in 2022, locals were promised that people from their municipality would be taken to undergo training for the renewable sector. This has not happened, he said.

Given Masina, another local and a member of the Khuthala environmental group, said he hasn’t heard anything about any reskilling, training, or skills development in Mpumalanga.

“Our kids are studying in the fields of coal, but coal is dying. People will be left without knowing what they can do,” he said. “If people are skilled, they can transfer skills to other people in the communities so that they have chances of being employed.”

This investigation by Climate Home News and Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center, and is part of a series on South Africa's Renewables Revolution.

The post Uncertainty on renewable retraining frightens South Africa’s coal communities appeared first on Climate Home News.

In an 50-minute televised interview, Andre De Ruyter claimed the company he led for three years had been infiltrated by violent organised criminals and that it is riddled with corruption to which the police, state security services, local politicians and central government turned a blind eye.

The ruling African National Congress party responded by calling De Ruyter a “naysayer” with a “rightwing ideological posture” and said his claims about corruption were “unfortunate, irresponsible, and baseless”.

At Cop26 in 2021, the South African government announced it would receive $8.5 billion of loans and grants from rich nations to fund projects like renewable power, electricity transmission lines, electric vehicle production and green hydrogen.

Much of this money will be spent by Eskom and De Ruyter said the deal was done “by and large at Eskom’s intervention”. The agreement, known as a just energy transition partnership (JETP), formed a model for similar deals with Indonesia and Vietnam.

Corruption crusader

Since taking over Eskom in 2019, De Ruyter said he had tried to root out corruption and to start shifting South Africa’s energy system from coal to clean energy. But he said he has been opposed by criminal cartels and by sections of the government and his coffee was poisoned with cyanide in December.

Asked if Eskom was a “feeding trough” for South Africa’s governing party, De Ruyter replied: “I would say the evidence suggests that it is. I expressed my concern to a senior government minister about attempts, in my view, to water down governance around the [JETP] and the response was essentially, you know, you have to be pragmatic. In order to pursue the greater good, you have to enable some people to eat a little bit”.

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De Ruyter did not say if attempts to weaken governance had been succesful. A spokesperson for Germany’s ministry for economic co-operation and development (BMZ) told Climate Home it was “aware of current issues at and around Eskom and in South Africa’s coal sector”.

The spokesperson added that donor countries promising to mobilise the $8.5bn “will jointly work with the government of South Africa to ensure that governance arrangements are in place for any funds that support the Just Energy Transition Partnership” and that every lender “will need to do due diligence around any proposed spending”.

These rich nations will have to “understand” Eskom’s and the South African government’s plans, the spokeperson said. “The continued fight of the government against corruption and crime in the energy sector is essential and also an important pre-condition to reduce the current huge level of load shedding.”

High scrutiny

Saliem Fakir, a South African who heads the Africa Climate Foundation told Climate Home that De Ruyter’s concern was “not far fetched” and that zero tolerance on corruption was necessary to make the energy transition just.

But, he said that investments made under the JETP were likely to be closely scrutinised because it is a high-profile initiative, it is climate finance and because the funds come from abroad.

In December 2022, South Africa’s energy minister Gwede Mantashe accused De Ruyter of “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state” by forcing planned power cuts, known as “load shedding”, on South Africans. Eskom had taken these measures since before De Ruyter became chief in December 2019, as South Africa’s electricity demand often outstrips supply.

After receiving no defence from prime minister Cyril Ramaphosa, De Ruyter handed in his resignation five days later. That same day, before news of his resignation was made public, his personalised coffee mug was poisoned with a mixture of cyanide and rat poison at Eskom’s headquarters. He said this was likely to be a response to his efforts to tackle corruption, sabotage and organised crime.

Criminal cartels

De Ruyter told ETV last week that one billion rand ($50m) was stolen from Eskom every month. The company is currently 423 billion rand ($22bn) in debt, hobbling its ability to end blackouts and carry out the energy transition.

De Ruyter said there are four criminal cartels operating in the province of Mpumalanga, the north-eastern region where most of the country’s coal is dug up and burned in power plants.

He said these cartels have a hit squad of 60-70 “highly trained, well armed” people they call “soldiers” who assassinate opponents and that they pay Eskom employees to sabotage machinery when it suits their business interests.

They bribe Eskom’s buyers, who spend their money on Maserati cars which aren’t registered to their name, wear Louis Vutton clothes and wash their hands in 15-year old whiskey, he said.

De Ruyter said that “vested interests” in the value chain explain why even a gradual energy transition “is so eagerly opposed and with such vehemence”. He quoted a colleague who told him “you are being naive, you aren’t showing the comrades a way to eat”.

Fakir told Climate Home that common scams include over-charging for diesel and stealing good-quality coal and replacing it with low-quality coal or ordinary rocks.

Authorities inaction

De Ruyter said that local and national politicians, the police and security services have failed to act against these cartels, blaming either incompetence or complicity.

He said local politicians in Mpumalanga are “complicit”, that police failed to charge corruption suspects, state security were “missing in action” and at least one unnamed minister had been aware of criminality and failed to act.

He said security services had targetted him for surveillance. In October, he claimed a bugging device was found in his car. Last week, he said a contact in the inspectorate general of intelligence had told him that type of device was “one of ours, we have lots of these”.

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When he travelled to Egypt for Cop27, a state security official travelled with his delegation. De Ruyter said a friend asked this man why he was there and he replied “just keeping an eye on the big guy”.

When his coffee was poisoned in December, he said the police tasked only junior-ranking police officers to investigate who had never heard of cyanide and needed doctors to explain what it was.

“Either this is monumental incomptence or they are just not interested in investigating this,” he said.

The ANC has responded to De Ruyter’s claims by urging him to lay criminal charges. If he doesn’t, the party said, they will bring charges against him for allegedly breaching anti-corruption rules.

In his interview, De Ruyter said he had informed police and advisers to president Cyril Ramaphosa of his concerns.

The post South Africa tried to weaken corruption safeguards in coal phase out deal, says CEO appeared first on Climate Home News.

“Coal is the heritage of this province, it is the backbone of our economy. It’s an undeniable fact,” says Philani Mngomezulu, founder of an established community-based greening project in the municipality called the Khuthala environmental group.

According to Mngomezulu, almost 80% of the more than 80,000 residents working and generating income in Ermelo are employed at Eskom and Transnet, the state-owned energy and transport companies. Camden is one of 12 coal power stations in Mpumalanga scheduled to be decommissioned in the coming years, most of them by 2035.

“As an environmental group, we are clear about the impact of coal on our environment, in particular climate change and pollution. However, as the community of Ermelo we will only be in agreement with the energy transition if it is going to impact positively on the local people,” he says.

Ermelo and other coal-mining regions in Mpumalanga province are at the frontline of South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET) process, which aims to repurpose coal power plants and coal-mining lands to greener energy. But coal workers are still hesitant and have said to feel left out of the country’s energy transition.

Lack of consultation

According to Mngomezulu, however, the people of Ermelo are in the dark when it comes to the transition because the government is not bringing consultations to the communities.

“We’ve been saying to the presidential climate commission [PCC] that they must come and do a proper consultation in Ermelo because people here are dependent on coal, so if we are going to shut down the power stations and any other coal mines without informing the community, that’s a bit unfair,” he said.

The PCC is a multi-stakeholder body set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa to “oversee and facilitate a just and equitable transition towards a low-emissions and climate-resilient economy” in South Africa.

Thulani Madlala, a ward councillor in the Msukaligwa municipality, says he is waiting to see how the transition will assist the local poverty-stricken people.

“We are waiting for the JET to be explained to the masses of our people on the ground. We hope that this programme doesn’t negatively affect the unemployment rate that is already here because, if that’s the case, our people are going to be against the transition,” Madlala says.

Meanwhile, Ermelo communities are living in “energy poverty: most of our informal settlements don’t have electricity, so they rely on coal, and some are able to profit from coal sales”, he says.

‘Causing havoc’

Data collated by the Oxpeckers’ #MineAlert tool shows that at least 227 government-licensed coal mines surround Ermelo. The area is also home to more than 3,000 small-scale artisanal miners who contribute to the local economy, pay rent, buy clothes and provide jobs.

Given Masina says the downside of phasing out coal is that businesses such as his will have to close. He started a coal yard in Wesselton, Ermelo’s satellite township, in 2011 that sells coal to community members and he employs people from the community.

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Masina says they had not heard anything from the government about consultations with the community. “Look, if they decide to phase out coal, this means I will also have to retrench the employees I have so far employed.”

“There is no doubt that this transition is causing havoc in South Africa. At the moment, power stations are being bombed because of this transition that is not being explained properly to the people of the country,” Masina says.

In December, the government deployed troops to at least four Eskom power stations after a series of incidents of theft and sabotage.

Employment opportunities

The JET plan, released in 2022, states that more than half the youth in Mpumalanga communities are unemployed and the coal value chain decline will further narrow employment opportunities as the sector downscales.

It shows that the coal sector provides direct jobs to almost 90,000 people in mines and power plants in the province, and indirect jobs for people who provide goods and services to the coal sector, which supports a significant portion of induced jobs and other economic activities.

Power utility Eskom says the implementation of JET is envisaged to create some 300,000 jobs in the renewables value chain. “This represents a net jobs gain,” said an Eskom spokesperson in response to Oxpeckers’ questions.

Given Masina says his coal yard will have to close and retrench employees from the local community (Photo: Thabo Molelekwa)

Research by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies published in 2022 indicates that in South Africa as a whole, job creation through renewables could exceed anticipated job losses in the coal sector.

However, in Mpumalanga, not all job losses in the fossil fuel sector can be replaced by clean energy jobs. Under an ambitious decarbonisation scenario, these net losses can be minimised.

The report states the two most important technologies for the energy transition in Mpumalanga will be wind and solar PV energy, which will also make the largest contributions to job creation: up to 43,000 jobs in solar PV and 28,900 jobs in wind energy by 2030.

Reskilling programmes

While people on the ground who spoke to Oxpeckers are unaware of reskilling programmes, Eskom says people employed at power stations due to be decommissioned are “being trained to obtain skills in the renewable industry so they may be able to manufacture, install and service the renewable energy components required to operate the repurposed power stations.”

“To achieve this end, and in partnership with the Cape Peninsula University of Technology’s South African Renewables Energy Technology Centre and recognised labour unions represented at Eskom, Eskom has established an accredited training centre at the Komati power station,” an Eskom spokesperson who asked not to be named said in response to Oxpeckers questions.

“Those whose skills are required at other coal-fired power stations get transferred to those stations to meet the staffing requirements there. As part of the shutdown plan, extensive socio-economic studies were conducted which included widespread consultation with all communities around the affected power stations.”

And most importantly, he said, Eskom assures all its employees that “no Eskom employee will lose their jobs because of the JET”.

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The spokesperson said employees who no longer work at Komati had either resigned, retired, or were transferred to other stations.

“Eskom plans to use its limited funding to catalyse the construction of renewables plants across the country,” the spokesperson said. “This is demonstrated by the leasing of land at Eskom power stations to allow private participants to rapidly bring online new generating capacity, inter alia.”

Unions sidelined

Michelle Cruywagen, the just transition and coal campaign manager at environmental justice NGO Groundwork, says unions set out processes for a just transition in 2018, “but the business and mining sectors didn’t really come on board in assisting with facilitating the transition, even though they are obliged to do so legally through the social and labour plans”.

“This can be coordinated through the minerals council [a mining industry employers organisation], and the unions who generally negotiate wages and retirement plans should have been leading the way forward,” she says.

Cruywagen maintains that the consequences now are that the transition is not being managed properly, and the job losses aren’t being mitigated because of a lack of management and political will, which puts communities in a vulnerable position.

“It’s fine to reskill people, but employment is actually the thing that people need,” she says. “Part of what we’re pushing for is to get local government involved so that they drive the message, raise awareness and facilitate engagement on the issues of a just transition at a local level.”

Thabo Molelekwa is a freelance health and environmental journalist, and an Associate of Oxpeckers Investigative Environmental Journalism. This investigation was originally published in Oxpeckers and was supported by the African Climate Foundation’s New Economy Campaigns Hub.

The post Coal communities fear South Africa’s clean energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Andre De Ruyter told police his coffee was poisoned with cyanide last month, after he had submitted his resignation as chief executive of Eskom and before this was made public.

As chief, De Ruyter sought to clean up corruption and mismanagement at Eskom, which has a central role in the country’s shift from a coal-dominated energy mix to renewables.

Specialist newswire EE Business Intelligence reported that, after drinking a cup of coffee in his office at Eskom’s headquarters in Johannesburg, De Ruyter became weak, dizzy and confused, shaking uncontrollably and vomiting copiously. He subsequently collapsed, unable to walk.

His security detail rushed De Ruyter to a doctor, where his condition was diagnosed as cyanide poisoning and treated accordingly. De Ruyter said he had reported this to the police.

It came at a time of heightened political tension. Days later, the ruling party at its annual conference decided to transfer control of Eskom to the government ministry of Gwede Mantashe, a defender of coal.

The head of the African Climate Foundation, Saliem Fakir, told Climate Home that these developments were “a huge disappointment” and would slow down the country’s energy transition.

Bumpy few months

President Cyril Ramaphosa is pursuing an $8.5 billion deal with rich nations to cut coal use, which generates 70% of South Africa’s electricity, and create green jobs.

Under the package, Eskom is tasked with repurposing aging apartheid-era coal plants to clean energy, building electricity transmission lines and promoting rooftop solar power.

Yet a scandal over the theft of millions of dollars from his game farm has weakened Ramaphosa’s authority. Political commentators and the main opposition party say mining and energy minister Mantashe has used the crisis to his advantage, gaining power within the party.

On 8 December, Mantashe accused De Ruyter of “actively agitating for the overthrow of the state” by forcing planned power cuts, known as “load shedding”, on South Africans. Eskom had taken these measures since before De Ruyter became chief in December 2019, as South Africa’s electricity demand often outstrips supply.

Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s minister of mineral resources and energy (Pic: GCIS/GovernmentZA/Flickr)

Neither Ramaphosa or public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan publicly defended De Ruyter from Mantashe’s criticism. On 13 December, De Ruyter handed in his resignation.

The next day he was allegedly poisoned and the day after that his resignation was made public. It’s not clear whether any attempted assassin knew he had resigned.

South African climate activist Alex Lenferna told Climate Home that De Ruyter “was moving things towards clean energy” and that his exit “may well see a rollback”.

From 16 to 20 December, the ruling African National Congress party gathered in Johannesburg for its elective conference. The conference decided that Mantashe’s energy ministry should take over control of Eskom from Gordhan’s public enterprises ministry. Ramaphosa later promised to implement this decision.

‘Coal fundamentalist’

Mantashe is a former coal miner and calls himself a “coal fundamentalist”. He has publicly criticised clean energy policies pursued by Ramaphosa and De Ruyter’s Eskom.

Five days after Ramaphosa announced the $8.5bn energy transition pact in November 2021, Mantashe told an energy conference “South Africa is rich with coal”. He added: “Globally, one summit after the other, certain industrialised countries refuse to jettison their use of fossil fuels. What had been pitted as global agreements lay hollow.”

Fakir told Climate Home that Mantashe was likely to slow down Eskom’s energy transition.

After the end of apartheid, South Africa’s coal mines came under predominantly black ownership. Those businesses enjoy good relationships with the political elite and want Eskom to keep buying their coal, Fakir said. De Ruyter was seen as a threat to those interests.

Fakir said that the rich nations backing the partnership would take note of Eskom’s troubles. “There will be deep, deep scepticism that this can be pulled in the right direction,” he said.

The post Eskom poisoning raises fears for South Africa’s energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Over the years, there have been various vehicles for this. Loans, grants, technology and training pass from developed to developing countries directly and indirectly through multi-lateral development banks and specialist vehicles like the Green Climate Fund.

At Cop26 in Glasgow last year, a new vehicle was announced. The UK, US, France, Germany and the US announced they would provide $8.5bn to help South Africa transition from coal to clean energy.

They called this a “just energy transition partnership” (Jetp). The “just” means they aim to look after the coal workers whose jobs are under threat from the transition from coal to clean energy.

Since then, other countries have jumped on board. At the G7 summit in Germany in June, the group of seven developed economies declared their support for the concept, adding Canada and Japan to list the of potential financial backers.

The German hosts also invited Senegal, Indonesia and India along to the Bavarian summit. They, and Vietnam, then began talks with the partners on their own South-African style deals. So, as the first anniversary of the Jetp concept approaches, how are those talks going?

South Africa – Ambitious plan with stingy backing

South Africa’s Jetp got a lot of fanfare at Cop26. President Cyril Ramaphosa described it as a “watershed moment not only for our own just transition but for the world as a whole”.

Details were slow to emerge. But South Africa has been doing the legwork. On Friday, Ramaphosa unveiled a 200-page blueprint for economic transition, poverty reduction and an end to blackouts through investment in renewables, green hydrogen and electric vehicles.

This will use the $8.5bn as a catalyst, Ramaphosa said, but that “is not sufficient to meet the scale of our ambition”. After factoring in expected investments from multilateral development banks and the private sector, there is a $39bn shortfall over the next five years, he estimates.

To shore up more investments, John Kerry is proposing to finance the part of the transition by allowing banks and companies to claim carbon credits for funding emissions cuts. The idea is controversial and has divided partner countries. Kerry could make an announcement at Cop27.

The biggest concern for South Africa is taking on too much debt. Only 4% of the $8.5bn package comes as grants. The country will pay interest on the rest.

That may not matter too much if the new clean industries turn a profit and boost the economy. However social security and retraining of coal workers is not obviously a profitable enterprise – and risks falling by the wayside.

At a pre-Cop27 briefing, even South African environment minister Barbara Creecy sounded concerned. “We have to be careful of climate financing that enhances debt of developing countries”, she said.

Presenting the blueprint to his climate advisory group, Ramaphosa said he was "placing the ball firmly in the court of the international community particularly developed economy countries that have through their own industrialisation… contributed greatly to the damage of our climate”.

Indonesia - Haggling on ambition

Like South Africa, Indonesia is a coal-producing and coal-reliant emerging economy. Unlike South Africa, its coal plants are relatively new and therefore more expensive to retire early. Indonesia wants more money on better terms than South Africa got.

According to leaked diplomatic cables seen by Politico, rich countries are offering $10bn. The Jakarta-based Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR) estimates that replacing all of Indonesia’s coal capacity with renewables will cost around $1.2 trillion by 2050. Its director Fabby Tumiwa previously told Climate Home an energy transition partnership worth $15bn would be “a fair amount”.

Tumiwa added that grants should make up more of the deal than they did with South Africa - at least 10%, he said. Replacing coal with renewables will require a lot of investment from state-owned utility Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), he said, and "it is unfair if that cost [is] borne by Indonesia[n] tax payer[s], while we are not the one causing today climate crisis".

The US is co-leading on the talks with Japan. They represent the contributor group of the G7, Norway, Denmark and perhaps soon New Zealand, Politico reports.

The leaked cables reveal the partner countries want Indonesia to cancel a new 5GW coal power plant, remove coal subsidies and roll out renewables faster. IESR research suggests Indonesia could save $5.7bn in health costs by 2030 by cancelling its $1.7bn coal subsidy bill.

The Indonesian government is expected to announce the Jetp deal at the G20 summit it is hosting on the island of Bali on 15-16 November. The country is only sending a vice-president to Cop27, as president Joko Widodo stays at home.

Vietnam - Jailed activists ignored

Vietnam is a one-party state where climate activists are unable to criticise the government freely. 

While the government in Hanoi talks about coal transition to donors, it has imprisoned four leading anti-coal activists on spurious tax evasion charges. The US, Germany and others have condemned the arrests of Nguy Thi Khanh, Mai Phan Loi, Bach Hung Duong and Dang Dinh Bach. 

A spokesperson for Germany's development ministry (BMZ) told Climate Home it had raised human rights concerns with the Vietnamese government. A separate source with knowledge of these discussions, said the Germans "received significant pushback". 

The activists' freedom may not be a deal-breaker. The BMZ spokesperson told Climate Home: "With the agreement on the Jetp, we also hope to be able to send a positive signal to climate activists." 

US climate envoy John Kerry told reporters recently he is “working very hard to get Vietnam to do what is sensible regarding the transition to energy” despite the fact "some forces are fighting to keep coal". 

Jake Schmidt, of the National Resources Defense Council, told Climate Home this was a mistake. “How can you have an investment plan in a country that does not allow experts to operate and ensure that the money is well spent and delivered in the right way? Until these four experts are freed and their ability to operate is resolved I don't think a Jetp can survive in that country." 

According to leaked EU documents reported by Politico, the initial offer of around $5bn is too low to seal the deal for Vietnam. 

The EU and UK want Vietnam to peak power emissions in 2030, cancel planned new coal plants built and build out 60GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Vietnam hasn't responded publicly. 

Anti-coal activist Nguy Thi Khanh, winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, is in jail on spurious tax evasion charges (Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize)

India - Early stages still

With more people and more emissions than the other Jetp nations put together, India is the biggest prize for emissions reduction. But it's Jetp negotiations are not as far advanced as for the three nations above.

There are no announcements expected at Cop27, which prime minister Narendra Modi is not scheduled to attend. There may be more progress next year when India takes over the G20 presidency from Indonesia.

Senegal - Gas a dealbreaker

Unlike the nations above, Senegal is not a major emerging economy and is not reliant on coal. One source said it was chosen because France wanted a French-speaking nation to take a lead on.

Like most African nations, Senegal's emissions are tiny. A third of its people lack access to electricity. The issue is how much and how quickly emissions grow.

Senegal's prime minister Macky Sall has been vocal about wanting to develop offshore gas deposits. He wants developed nations' help in this and has found a sympathetic ear in Germany's Olaf Scholz.

But, as a group, the partner countries have made clear to him that a Jetp will not finance any fossil fuels. Any deal will focus on renewables, so Senegal can "leapfrog" the polluting stage of development.

These talks have received less political attention and no announcements are expected at Cop27.

The post As Cop27 kicks off, where are the coal to clean deals at? appeared first on Climate Home News.

That can be seen in a summary of the financing provisions obtained by Climate Home News.

It shows that $4.6bn – 54% of the funding – is earmarked as concessional loans, with better borrowing terms than South Africa can access on the open market. Just under half of that money is provided by Germany and France.

The remaining $3.7bn, or 43%, include a mix of commercial loans and investment guarantees to de-risk projects so they attract private investors. These will come from the EU, US and the UK, which is contributing the largest share.

Only $230m will be delivered collectively by donor countries as grants – 2.7% of the total package.

South Africa’s cabinet approved an investment plan for the money on Wednesday, but has yet to publish it. A launch is expected at the Cop27 climate summit next month.

The South African government has been in negotiations with partner governments since striking an outline deal at the Cop26 climate summit in November 2021.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly said his government would only accept a deal that offered good terms. Most of the money should come as grants, he said shortly after Cop26, and any loans should be at concessional rates.

Ramaphosa's government has been trying to reduce the country's sovereign debt, which stands at around 70% of GDP.

A distinctive feature of the package was its focus on supporting workers in the transition to clean energy, with social protection measures and retraining.

But under the breakdown seen by Climate Home, less than 1% of the money is earmarked for direct social investments. In contrast, 5% is to develop a green hydrogen sector.

Repurposing coal power stations

South Africa pitched for the funds so that debt-burdened state utility Eskom could repurpose coal-fired power stations. The funding is expected to support Eskom decommission three coal power plants and replace them with renewables.

The utility’s dire financial situation means it is unable to borrow money at market rates.

Through their development agencies, Germany and France are respectively providing $1.2bn and $1bn in concessional finance.

The largest share comes from the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIFs) Accelerating Coal Transition initiative.

With $500m of seed funding, the CIFs initiative is expected to leverage a further $2.1bn in both public and private finance, according to documents published last week. That includes an estimated $875m from the private sector, counted towards the $8.5bn total.

South Africa approves $8.5bn energy transition investment plan

By de-risking investments and reforming policies, partners aim to attract further investments from the private sector in renewable energy. Around 80% of the package is earmarked for the electricity sector.

The UK government, which led negotiations on the package with the EU, is providing the largest share of commercial loans and guarantees to unlock funding from the African Development Bank and the private sector, with a contribution totalling $1.7bn.

US contribution

The US is providing $1bn in funding through its Development Finance Corporation (DFC), whose terms are not preferential enough to be counted as concessional funding.

Jake Schmidt, of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, told Climate Home the US' relatively small contribution could be explained by the fact Washington has "historically less bilateral relations with South Africa than other contributing countries".

Schmidt added that donor countries need to mobilise more money to make a deal appealing to other coal-dependent emerging countries negotiating an energy transition partnership, including Indonesia and Vietnam.

"I hope they find a slightly better offer for other countries if they are going to move this forward. South Africa needs financing so desperately because Eskom is in so much debt. But others might not be so desperate."

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In a short statement, cabinet said the plan “outlines the investments required to achieve the decarbonisation commitments made by the government of South Africa while promoting sustainable development, and ensuring a just transition for affected workers and communities”.

The plan, expected to be published at next month’s Cop27 climate summit, follows nearly a year of negotiations between the governments of South Africa and the UK, EU, US, France and Germany, which are contributing funds.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly said his government would only accept a deal that offered good terms, based on grants and concessional funding, that aligns with national development goals, including debt reduction and job creation.

Yet insiders told Climate Home News that less than 3% of the money will be delivered as grants, with the rest split between concessional and commercial loans.

International finance experts have questioned whether package offers the country better terms than it can already access on local and international markets.

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South Africa’s electricity system is the most carbon intensive in the world and depends on coal for more than 80% of its power.

The partnership struck at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow was intended to help South Africa create a low-carbon economy and deliver on the upper range of its 2030 climate targets.

At a time when donor countries were failing to deliver on their climate finance promises, including to collectively mobilise $100bn a year by 2020, the package was hailed as a model for emerging economies to go green.

But participating governments have been slow to reveal who is contributing what and how it will be spent.

“The whole world is watching to see if the money is actually mobilised in South Africa. It’s extremely important that donors follow through with their commitments,” said Leo Roberts, of think tank E3G’s coal transition team.

South Africa turns to renewables, gas and batteries to end power cuts

The investment plan will focus on the electricity sector, electric vehicle manufacturing and development of green hydrogen.

It is expected to cover the closure and repurposing of coal-fired power plants by state utility Eskom, expansion of the transmission network and social protection and retraining for workers who lose their jobs.

Campaigners are worried a skew towards commercial loans will add to South Africa’s debt burden and leave workers behind. They have repeatedly called for more transparency in the process.

While the private sector is likely to support investments in renewable energy, other activities such as reskilling coal workers need public finance – largely in the form of grants.

“The terms have to be fair finance. They have to reduce the debt load,” Saliem Fakir, executive director of the African Climate Foundation, told Climate Home.

Indonesia is learning lessons from South Africa’s tough energy transition deal talks

For Roberts, of E3G, the lack of transparency led to a misleading idea that the partnership was a “new climate finance paradigm”.

“It is a diplomatic and political process to bring countries and stakeholders together at a table for discussion and to use an amount of public finance to leverage private finance. And that is ground-breaking. The price tag was a distraction but was needed to get everyone to the table,” he said.

Fakir said that process had the potential to create “a big shift” in South Africa. “It allows sovereign ownership of a process and arrangements for much larger-scale funding,” he said.

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In a prime-time address to the nation on Monday, Ramaphosa said: “After more than a decade without reliable electricity supply, South Africans are justifiably frustrated and angry. They are fed up.”

Ramaphosa blamed the power cuts on the country’s old and unreliable coal power plants, on the “design flaws” in two new coal power plants and on “extensive theft, fraud and sabotage” and “years of state capture and mismanagement” under his predecessor Jacob Zuma.

After talking to trade unions, business, experts and opposition parties, Ramaphosa said he planned to fix the black-outs by improving the existing power plants, encouraging investment in renewables, flexible gas generators and battery storage and enabling businesses and households to sell rooftop solar to the grid.

Reaction to the speech was broadly positive. The opposition Democratic Alliance said the plan was “straight out of the DA playbook” and should have come much sooner.

Happy Khambule, Business Unity South Africa’s head of energy and environment, told Climate Home: “It was a positive, [Ramaphosa] listened to business and experts and not just his immediate circle. The announcements are practical and indicate the low hanging fruits, most of what was announced was going to happen anyway it is just highlighted and expedited.”

Groundwork campaigner Bobby Peek said “if we have the right approach in terms of efficiency and renewable energy…we’ll be able to get our energy system up speedily and back on track”. But, he warned “any expansion of the gas infrastructure will be investing money into a dead end road, as well as a stranded asset”.

350.org campaigner Alex Lenferna told Climate Home that he had “mixed feelings about it”. He said: “The speech and the plan are the easy part though, the implementation is where the [ruling African National Congress party] so often falls short.”

Lenferna also criticised the focus on the private sector. “In a country as unequal as South Africa, if the energy transition is largely left to the private sector or the market, then the benefits are likely to concentrate in the hands of corporations and the wealthy,” he said.

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South Africa got 90% of its electricity from coal in 2019, making it Africa’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

Under Ramaphosa, South Africa has made efforts to pivot to renewables. It has set a net zero by 2050 target and is negotiating a pioneering “just transition” deal with wealthy countries to ease the pain for regions that are economically reliant on coal.

The Ramaphosa government has revived a renewable energy procurement scheme, allowing the private sector to invest and cutting red tape for small projects. More controversially, it has also committed to paying floating gas power plants to provide power.

This focus on renewables and gas will continue, Ramaphosa said yesterday. A request for proposals for battery storage, which enables renewable power to be stored for when it is needed, will be released in September. A request for gas power will be released shortly after.

Licensing requirements for renewables will be removed and homes and business will be able to sell their rooftop solar power to the grid.

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The state-owned electricity company Eskom has made land available for renewable next to its coal power stations and, Ramaphosa said last night, will continue to set aside more land for this purpose.

A promised $8.5 billion package from the US and European countries will be used to repurpose old coal power plants and to invest in the grid. The list of projects South Africa wants funded is still being drawn up but is likely to include electricity transmission lines to take power from solar and wind farms to cities and heavy industries.

Ramaphosa said South Africa will buy electricity from its neighbours Botswana and Zambia, who have a surplus. Botswana’s electricity is produced with coal while Zambia’s is made with hydropower.

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At Cop26 last year, the UK, US, France, Germany, EU and South Africa signed an agreement for rich countries to provide $8.5bn in assistance to help the coal-reliant African nation transition to renewables.

Since then, rich nations and the government of South Africa have been split on how much of the finance should be grants, as opposed to loans, and how much should be new and additional to existing finance pledges.

But the model for this energy transition partnership has attracted the interest of other coal-reliant emerging economies like Indonesia, Vietnam and India as well as Senegal, a growing gas producer.

Talks for a similar deal with Indonesia are the most advanced, with the US and Japan leading talks on behalf of a group of rich countries. A deal is expected to be announced in November, either at Cop27 in Egypt or at the Indonesia-hosted G20 summit.

Fabby Tumiwa, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR) is advising the Indonesian government on the partnership. He told Climate Home News the government is focused on avoiding what it sees as missteps in the South Africa agreement.

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In South Africa’s case, $8.5bn of funding was announced at Cop26 without a plan for how the money will be spent. This week, donor countries said the money will be “matched” to an investment plan which the South African government is drawing up. A first draft is expected next month.

Tumiwa said Jakarta wants to reverse the process and propose a list of projects that could be funded and their costings before donor nations put money on the table.

“[South Africa] got the money first and then they started consultation [on how] the money will be used. What we found out is that it’s not actually new money, its old money, from a different mechanism,” he said. “The Indonesian process is quite different.”

Tumiwa warned against double-counting the cash, adding that the funds needed to be new and additional. Of the $8.5bn pledged to South Africa, $0.5bn come from a previously-announced pot of money from the Climate Investment Funds. Donor countries have so far refused to provide a full breakdown of the remaining $8bn.

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How much money is put forward should also be increased compared to the South Africa deal, Tumiwa said. “By my estimation, we need at least double what South Africa had,” he said, suggesting $15bn would be “a fair amount”.

In an unpublished report, seen by Climate Home, Tumiwa’s think-tank IESR estimates there are 5GW of coal plant capacity which are highly-polluting and inefficient and could be closed at a cost of $4.5bn. That is “low-hanging fruit,” he said.

In total, IESR estimates that replacing all of Indonesia’s coal capacity with renewables will cost around $1.2 trillion. An accelerated coal phase-out will save 168,000 Indonesian lives through to 2050, more than $60bn in health costs and $128bn in coal subsides, it found.

Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest polluters, southeast Asia’s largest economy and has nearly five times more people than South Africa. Yet, South Africa is more dependent on coal for its electricity than Indonesia.

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The other major topic of controversy in the South African deal has been the issue of debt. The South African government wants most of the funding to be delivered in grants, which are not paid back, rather than loans, which will add to the country’s national debt.

“There needs to be a very substantive grant element,” South African climate negotiator Zaheer Fakir told Climate Home. Grants are particularly necessary to fund social protection measures and programmes like the re-training of coal miners.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has faced political pressure over this from the left-wing opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, who claim that by taking loans they are putting the country at the mercy of the US and Europe.

EEF deputy leader Floyd Shivambu called the energy transition a “colonial take-over engineered by the West” while his leader Julius Malema questioned why the deal was announced by the UK’s prime minister not South Africa’s, adding this “suggested that they were undermining the sovereignty of our country”.

The Indonesian government shares South Africa’s concerns about debt. “The government expects to have grants. It doesn’t really want to have a loan – for sure,” said Tumiwa.

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In both cases, the transition from coal to renewables is a key priority. But unlike South Africa’s, the Indonesian government wants that to be the funding deal’s sole purpose.

In contrast, the South African government wants the deal to trigger investments in other green technologies like electric vehicles and green hydrogen production. These don’t bring emissions reductions as quickly as a coal to renewables switch but the government believes it can create more jobs and help boost exports.

In an interview with Climate Home on Thursday, Cop26 president Alok Sharma insisted that each transition partnership agreed with developing countries “will be unique in the sense that they will have different mechanisms… and they will need to do different things…. to get finance flowing”.

However, he recognised that the South Africa partnership, being the first one, “will provide a sort of working framework for everything that comes afterwards”.

The post Indonesia is learning lessons from South Africa’s tough energy transition deal talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

The heaviest rains in decades pummeled the KwaZulu-Natal province, killing more than 300 people and causing billions of rand worth of damages to properties and infrastructure.

Torrential rainfall caused mudslides which trapped people under buildings, with officials describing the event as “one of the worst weather storms in the history of our country.” President Cyril Ramaphosa said the flooding was “a catastrophe of enormous proportions”.

“First indications are that about one month of average rainfall occurred over one or two days,” Mark New, director of the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), told Climate Home News.  

“After detailed analysis, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a one-in-a-hundred-year event, or even rarer,” New said.

Some survivors blamed poor drainage and badly built housing for the high death toll. Durban mayor Mxolisi Kaunda disagreed, insisting the scale of flooding was unexpected.

But the authorities have questions to answer over the province’s preparedness for such an extreme event.

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The South African Weather Service forecast the flooding over 24 hours in advance, but did not issue a red alert. On Monday evening they raised an orange warning, indicating a medium likelihood of severe impacts, including loss of life. 

“The reason the warning never reached red is that issuing a red level warning requires coordination with provincial and local disaster management authorities,” Christopher Jack, deputy director of the Climate System Analysis Group at the University of Cape Town, told Climate Home News. 

“The impact is likely an order of magnitude higher than it should have been had sufficient effort and resources been effectively directed towards upgrading informal settlements and improving management of rivers,” Jack said. “Improved disaster risk management doesn’t have to cost a lot, it just requires better coordination.”

Debra Roberts, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts, said the deadly floods had hit the poor hardest. 

“It’s the poor and disadvantaged that are carrying the heaviest load in terms of climate impacts,” Roberts told scientists and policymakers at the Royal Society London on Monday by video link from Durban.

Inequitable access to basic services is exacerbating this injustice, she said. “People who have access to basic services have a much higher adaptive capacity to those who don’t – and if you go out into Durban’s informal settlements today you’ll see just how true that is.”

Insurance is one way for communities to recover from severe flooding, but Roberts said people living in informal settlements do not have access to this. “They literally lost everything. They will experience a loss in living standards. Many have lost absolutely all the material goods that they have in this world including their house today,” she said.

IPCC: US seeks to remove ‘losses and damages’ from scientific report on climate impacts

Gina Ziervogel, associate professor in the department of environmental science at the University of Cape Town, said high levels of poverty in South Africa undermine the country’s ability to withstand climate shocks.

“Adapting to climate does require improving early warning systems and infrastructure to withstand extreme events. But it also requires addressing inequality and capacity more broadly to deal better with multiple shocks,” she said. 

Francois Engelbrecht, director and professor of climatology at the University of the Witwatersrand, told Climate Home News that a very similar flooding event occurred three years ago, causing severe mudslides which killed 70 people in the province.

“The 2019 event should have been a clear warning to the provincial and national governments, about how vulnerable communities in the province are to flash floods and mudslides,” he said.  “As long as we have communities in South Africa living in areas below the flood line, or along steep hillsides where mudslides occur, the hard reality is that we will see more lives being lost during extreme rainfall events.”

The IPCC’s sixth assessment report warned that rising temperatures will increase the frequency and the intensity of heavy rainfall and flooding in southeastern Africa, as well as the wind speeds of tropical storms and the proportion of category 4-5 cyclones.

Climate change made extreme rainfall during a series of major storms in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique this year heavier and more frequent, according to analysis from World Weather Attribution. The region was hit by three cyclones and two tropical storms in six weeks. 

“The rainfall associated with such storms has become more likely and more intense,” Dr Friederike Otto from Imperial College London said. “What we can say for sure is, the damages of such storms have become worse.”

The South African Weather Service and provincial government did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment. 

The post No red alert was issued ahead of deadly South African floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

“The oceans are sacred to us,” said Sinegugu Zukulu, an Amadiba environmental activist. People in training to become traditional healers, known as sangomas, perform rituals on the beach to consult with their ancestors and many African churches perform baptisms in the ocean. “So we cannot allow our ocean to be used for activities that are going to lead to destruction and render the ocean useless to us.”

His warning is addressed at Shell, the European oil major that has paid ships to shoot soundwaves at the bed of the Indian Ocean in an attempt to find oil. Zuklulu and other campaigners took the oil major to court, arguing that local communities were not properly consulted. They say the seismic surveys will scare off fish and any future oil spill would devastate the region’s fishing and tourism industries and cause spiritual damage.

Just before the New Year, a high court judge made an interim ruling in their favour. He ordered Shell to stop drilling while the court case plays out. The timetable for the full case will be decided on Monday.

Shell has cancelled its contract with the survey vessel. As the weather window for surveying is closing, they are unlikely to start again any time soon. The oil major is “considering best way forward,” a spokesperson said.

Zukulu thinks the battle is far from over. “Shell doesn’t give up easily,” he said. “They have got deep pockets. They will always put up a fight”.

Typhoon Rai’s trail of destruction in the Philippines reignites loss and damage calls

But Shell’s stomach for a fight may be diminishing. In December, it pulled out of the Cambo oil field development off the coast of Scotland, only a few months after a Stop Cambo campaign got organised.

A spokesperson said the “economic case for investment in this project is not strong enough at this time, as well as having the potential for delays”. Why would there be delays? Kayaking activists for one. Opposition from Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon for another.

Under its climate strategy, Shell plans to decrease oil production 1-2% a year on a path to net zero (with caveats) by 2050. That doesn’t mean drilling stops. Its wells have a natural decline rate of 5%. Shell is still exploring new frontiers, just more selectively, prioritising “value over volumes”.

Last May, a Dutch court ruled that the Hague-headquartered company needed to go further, in a landmark case. Shell was ordered to reduce its emissions, including those from customers using its products, by 45% between 2019 and 2030.

Sjoukje Van Oosterhout, who led campaigners’ research for the Dutch court case, said that for Shell to comply with the court’s ruling then “there’s not many other ways than decreasing oil and gas production all over the world”.

The company is appealing but the appeal will not be heard until late 2023 at the earliest. In the meantime, it is legally obliged to comply with the judgement although how this will be enforced is unclear.

Germany ‘must triple pace of emissions cuts’ to meet 2030 target

Mike Coffin, a Carbon Tracker researcher and former BP geologist told Climate Home News that there was a divide between European oil majors like Shell, BP and Eni and US-based firms like Conoco Phillips, Exxon-Mobil and Chevron.

Carbon Tracker’s ranking of oil firms in order of climate ambition

He said: “Those [European] companies… see lower long term oil prices perhaps than North American companies who may be a bit more bullish on how long the oil sector can continue.”

In Argentina, Equinor and Shell’s proposals for offshore oil exploration provoked thousands of people to protest in Buenos Aires last week. Protesters told AFP they were worried about oil spills and the effects of seismic exploration on sealife.

In the US, campaigners are challenging in court an auction of oil exploration licenses in the Gulf of Mexico. Joe Biden’s administration, under pressure from a Louisiana court ruling, launched an auction at which Shell bought several leases.

Shell’s “core positions” for oil and gas production as of February 2021. They’ve now sold their Permian assets. (Photo: Screenshot/Youtube)

Elsewhere, Shell’s oil production has met less resistance. Shell holds a minority stake in Brazil’s offshore Mero oil and gas fields.  Claudio Angelo, communications co-ordinator at Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory, said this development is not a high-profile political issue, partly because journalists and campaigners are focused on emissions from the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

“Shell has long seen Brazil as a strategic lifeline as it faced setbacks elsewhere, for climate legislation or other reasons,” he said.

Other major Shell oil and gas production sites include those in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Oman, Malaysia and Brunei where civil society is generally weaker and less focused on climate change.

The post Why Shell is becoming a softer target for climate campaigners appeared first on Climate Home News.

The nation is at the heart of a string of announcements in Glasgow, UK to support developing countries in ditching the most polluting fossil fuel.

After months of high-level political negotiations, France, Germany, the UK, the US and the EU announced an $8.5 billion package of grants and concessional finance over 3-5 years to accelerate the retirement of coal plants and the deployment of renewable energy.

Crucially, it also targets economic regeneration in coal mining regions, with electric vehicle manufacturing and green hydrogen among the potential alternative job opportunities.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa described it as “a watershed moment”.

“South Africa has consistently argued that developed economies must support a just transition in developing economies. [This] represents a first-of-its kind partnership to turn these commitments into reality, and a model for similar forms of collaboration globally,” he said.

“We’re witnessing the end of coal power in real-time,” Leo Roberts, research manager for think tank E3G’s coal transition team told Climate Home News. These announcements “point to a shift towards a world in which finance is available to help developing countries move away from coal”.

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The partnership could be emulated by others amid a raft of commitments to ditch coal.

Indonesia, Vietnam and Chile are among 18 new countries that committed not to build or invest in new coal power and phase out coal plants in the 2040s .

Earlier this week, Indonesia’s finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the country could phase out coal power by 2040, with financial support from the international community. That is a major shift from its national climate submission to the UN earlier this year, which sees coal meeting 38% of electricity demand in 2050.

Like South Africa, Indonesia has communities dependent on coal mining, who could suffer from a transition to clean energy in the absence of economic regeneration.

For the first time, financial instruments are being put together to address the issue.

Part of the South African package includes $500 million from a $2bn Accelerating Coal Transition (ACT) initiative launched by the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) in Glasgow on Wednesday.

It is the first dedicated international fund to help developing countries exit coal, with funding from the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and Denmark.

Caught between EU pressure and soaring demand, AIIB weighs end to gas finance

Indonesia, India, the Philippines and South Africa are the first beneficiaries of the scheme that aims to leverage private investments to support the transition from coal to clean energy. Together, they represent more than 15% of global coal-related emissions.

Mafalda Duarte CEO of the Climate Investment Funds, told Climate Home News the fund aims to catalyse at least 10 times its core funding by bringing in private financiers and multilateral development banks.

Duarte told Climate Home the fund aimed to address a gap in the financial architecture by providing support to reskill coal workers and social protection measures such as temporary income support to those losing their jobs.

“If we don’t provide this support, this coal phase out is probably not going to happen in time to meet our climate objectives,” she said.

The $8.5bn package is “groundbreaking”  because it was “co-created” by South Africa and donor countries, rather than imposed by wealthy nations, Maesela Kekana, South Africa’s climate change chief negotiator, told Climate Home News.

Kekana said environment minister Barbara Creecy had been lobbying the CIFs for a coal transition programme to be established.

“We were right at the forefront. We fought for that. That’s how important the ACT programme is for us,” he said.

“There’s nothing like this out there. It’s never been done before. And now we’re going to roll it out,” he said. “We are determined to make this work because we believe that this is a good model.”

Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26

South Africa pitched for the funds after debt-burdened state utility Eskom said it was seeking $10bn in international finance to help it shut most of its coal-fired power plants by 2050.

The country uses coal for 87% of its electricity generation and 20% of its liquid fuels, drawing on significant domestic resources.

UK climate envoy John Murton and a delegation from the US in September helped to seal the deal ahead of Cop26.

“That was a turning point in our view because we started to realise how serious these countries were. Everyone was working non-stop at the technical and political level to make it happen,” Kekana said.

With Eskom accounting for around 41% of the country’s emissions, decarbonising the electricity grid is a priority for South Africa to meet its climate goal. But the deal goes beyond cutting coal emissions to creating alternative, cleaner jobs and livelihoods.

Jesse Burton, an energy policy researcher focusing on the South African coal sector, said the package could help address some of the technical challenges of the transition, which have been impeded by Eskom’s huge debt.

“But how the pot of money is going to be carved out need to be ironed out. It’s can’t just be about rolling out renewables, it has to be about the just transition,” she said.

The post South Africa $8.5bn finance package offers a model for ending reliance on coal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Coal-reliant South Africa has cut its emission cap for 2030 by nearly a third, from 614 million tonnes of Co2 equivalent to 420 Mt Co2e.

The target was included in the country’s climate plan, which was submitted to the UN on Monday after approval by the cabinet last week.

The document says South Africa “has warmly welcomed” the special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on how to limit warming to 1.5C.

“South Africa considers the IPCC reports to be of the highest importance in guiding our actions,” it said.

Campaigners told Climate Home News the target was a “step forward” and showed the value of official government climate advisory bodies like the Presidential Climate Commission (PCC).

But they warned that the target was still not compatible with 1.5C of global warming.

European gas shortages prompt calls to accelerate clean energy transition

The previous target of 398-614 MtCo2e was set in 2016. Since then, Cyril Ramaphosa has replaced Jacob Zuma as South Africa’s president, the cost of renewables has decreased rapidly and many nations have increased their climate ambition.

Earlier this year, the Ramaphosa government floated a new target of 398-440 mt Co2e and launched a consultation. On the advice of the PCC, that was further tightened to 398-420 mt Co2e.

Also on the PCC’s advice, the government set an interim 2025 target of 398-510 mt Co2 e, at least a slight decrease on 2018 levels.

Mandy Rambharos, PCC member and just transition manager at state-owned utility Eskom, said she was "very encouraged" by the new target, describing it as a "step in the right direction".

Greenpeace Africa adviser and PCC member Happy Khambule told Climate Home News: "I am pleased because it shows that independent, multi stakeholder forums are important in synthesising highly complex and charged issues."

But, he said, the 420 mt target is only aligned with a 2C limit on global warming, rather than the 1.5C many climate vulnerable countries have called for.

"For South Africa, this shows progress but leadership is 288Mts in 2030," he said.

Merkel’s legacy: a robust diplomat who surrendered to coal and cars back home

Three other members of the PCC have said their colleagues' advice and the government's target do not go far enough.

In a July letter published by Climate Home News, three campaigners on the PCC called for a 354 mt Co2e target for 2030, a fossil fuel free electricity system by 2040 at the latest and no new fossil fuel projects.

“The commission’s range is still not sufficient,” Melissa Fourie, one of the authors of the letter and the executive director of South Africa’s Centre for Environmental Rights, told Climate Home in July.

The PCC was formed in January and made up of different interest groups including environmental campaigners, trade unionists and business representatives.

More than 90% of South Africa’s energy is generated from coal, mainly mined and burned in the country’s northeast by Eskom.

These high energy emissions mean that South Africa's per capita CO2 emissions are the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and greater than developed countries like France and the UK.

Eskom's ability to invest in renewable energy has been hampered by its colossal level of debt. To get around this, it is looking to partner with investors.

The utility is also struggling to make electricity supply more reliable and tackle frequent blackouts.

The coal industry employs many people so the climate plan emphasised the transition to clean energy must be fair to coal workers and their communities.

The post On expert advice, South Africa cuts its 2030 emissions cap by a third appeared first on Climate Home News.

Environment minister Barbara Creecy told a ministerial meeting designed to make progress on key issues ahead of the Cop26 climate talks that countries should agree on a quantifiable increase of vulnerable communities’ ability to adapt to extreme weather events, flooding, droughts and sea level rise.

Creecy said focus should be put on increasing health benefits, food and water security and adapting infrastructure to anticipated climate impacts particularly in Africa, small island developing states and least developed countries.

Scaling up adaptation was one of five themes discussed during the two-day summit at London’s Park Plaza hotel, which gathered 51 ministers from a representative group of countries.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma said countries agreed on the need for Cop26 to” accelerate progress on the global goal on adaptation”.

While there were no breakthroughs on the most contentious issues ahead of the Glasgow summit, Sharma described the talks as “positive” and “hugely refreshing” to meet in-person after more than 18 months of virtual discussions.

G20 climate and energy ministers split over coal exit

Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to establish a global goal on adaptation to enhance nations’ adaptative capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change.

But the accord stopped short of setting out what the goal should look like and how progress should be assessed.

While there are well established methods for monitoring emissions and efforts to limit global temperature rise, finding a common metric for various ways of adapting to regional climate impacts is challenging.

In a letter to all countries earlier this month, Sharma said Cop26 needed to start a work programme to define the objective and the indicators against which progress should be assessed.

Nearly 100 developing countries, including South Africa, have previously described progress towards defining and implementing the goal as “glacial” since the 2015 climate accord was signed.

“Cop26 needs to deliver a substantial acceleration,” they said in a five-point-plan setting out benchmarks for success at Cop26.

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Zaheer Fakir, a climate negotiator and chief policy advisor in South Africa’s environment minister, told Climate Home News that it was important to reflect the priorities of developing countries.

“South Africa is of the view that limited progress in elaborating granular details on adaptation undermines the political balance achieved in Paris, as well as the intent of achieving parity between mitigation and adaptation,” he said.

Creecy also floated a number for the next collective climate finance goal, suggesting $750 billion should be mobilised annually by 2030. Talks on the issue are due to start in earnest in Glasgow on how to go beyond an overdue $100bn target.

In a proposal ahead of the meeting, nearly 100 developing countries said rich nations should supply at least $100bn a year of public finance from 2025, to be supplemented from other sources.

Neither idea got much reaction from the states that would be expected to deliver.

But UN Climate Change head Patricia Espinosa said the tone of the conversation on finance was shifting.

“I think we are entering into a very serious and deeper conversation regarding climate finance ,” she said.

Indonesia to burn coal well into the 2050s, under updated climate plan

Espinosa said discussions across the two-day meeting had been “unusual” in that ministers were “really engaging with each other in a conversation” rather than merely reiterating entrenched positions. Potential landing zones and compromises emerged, she added, “but the homework is not yet done”.

To make progress in the next three months, the UK has mandated a small group of countries to advance discussions on specific topics.

Canada’s Jonathan Wilkinson and Germany’s Jochen Flasbarth have been tasked to deliver a roadmap for how donor countries will meet and exceed the $100bn milestone for climate finance.

Rwanda and Switzerland will hold informal ministerial discussion towards an agreement on aligning countries’ climate plans to cover a period of 5 or 10 years while Singapore and Norway will seek common ground on carbon markets.

Comment: Europe’s floods hit my childhood home, sweeping away my parents’ sense of safety

Meanwhile, the UK will continue its work to keep the 1.5C temperature goal within reach, pursuing a contentious global agreement to exit coal.

Sharma said he was “very disappointed” that the G20 failed to sign up to that agenda last week.

“Unless we are going to get all countries signed up to an unabated coal phase out, keeping 1.5C within reach is going to be extremely difficult,” he said. The UK will continue to discuss the issue with G20 nations to “see how we can try and get this over the line over the coming months”.

The post South Africa proposes global goal for adaptation at pre-Cop26 ministerial appeared first on Climate Home News.

In September, the government said it would aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — but the plan still allows coal beyond that date. 

To achieve its 2050 goal, president Cyril Ramaphosa set up a presidential climate change commission to advise the government on how to ensure a just transition away from coal and reduce its emissions. 

In its first public report, the commission recommended the government set a tougher target and limit its annual greenhouse gas emissions to 350-420 MtCO2 by 2030. This would deepen emissions cuts by 31% compared to South Africa’s 2015 pledge, which capped emissions at 614 MtCO2. 

Its recommendations are more ambitious than what the government is currently proposing. Under a draft 2030 climate plan, published in March, the government said it aimed to limit its annual emissions to 398-440 MtCO2 by 2030 – a 28% emissions cut compared to the 2015 target. 

The commission said there was “scope for considerably greater emission reductions” by accelerating energy efficiency measures, bringing forward the decommissioning and repurposing of coal-fired power stations as they become financially unviable and replacing them with low-carbon energy capacity.

It argued increased climate ambition could help unlock more financial support to help the country move away from coal.

Comment: Delivering an inclusive Cop26 in the age of Covid-19 requires more than vaccines

In a statement, Ramaphosa said he will consider the commission’s recommendations, which will inform a decision on stepping up the country’s climate ambition ahead of the Cop26 climate talks. 

Saliem Fakir, executive director for the Africa Climate Foundation, told Climate Home News, the new targets would make ongoing support for coal “untenable”. “If adopted it will be a major breakthrough,” he said. 

But three members of the 22-strong presidential commission, which includes environmentalists, trade unions and business groups, say the proposal doesn’t go far enough.

In a letter, seen by Climate Home News, they write: “What is needed is zero fossil fuels in electricity generation by at least 2040 (though 2035 would be preferred); and a zero fossil fuel economy by 2050. This will mean no new fossil fuel projects come on line or are considered.” 

The letter calls on the commission to support a more rapid decommissioning of coal plants, recognising that some coal assets will become stranded. It adds the government should cancel a pipeline of major gas projects, including the proposed 8400MW Nseleni floating gas power plant in the city Richards Bay and a 3000MW gas development in Coega, near Port Elizabeth.  

Plans for a 3,300MW coal-fired power station should also be scrapped, they said.  

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“The commission’s range is still not sufficient,” Melissa Fourie, one of the authors of the letter and the executive director of South Africa’s Centre for Environmental Rights, told Climate Home.

The letter argues for a significantly tougher climate target in line with what would be South Africa’s fair share to limit global heating to 1.5C: capping annual emissions to 274–352 MtCO2 by 2030. 

“The low-hanging fruit here is the electricity sector, where we could substantially decarbonise at minimal cost,” said Fourie. “As a first step, the government should abandon its plans for new fossil fuel (coal and gas) electricity capacity.” 

Row erupts at Green Climate Fund over who defines climate adaptation

The climate commission’s report found that South Africa will require “considerably higher levels of international financial support” to transition away from a coal-dependent energy system.

South Africa estimates it will need $8 billion a year from the international community by 2030 to finance its decarbonisation and adaptation efforts. 

State-owned utility Eskom, which operates most of the country’s coal-fired power plants, is asking for $10bn from global lenders to help its transition from coal to renewables. 

In 2020, Eskom’s coal plants generated 86% of the country’s electricity, making South Africa the most coal-reliant country among the G20 group of nations.   

Eskom is currently building two of the world’s largest coal plants, Medupi and Kusile, which are not scheduled to close until at least 2060. Yet, Eskom’s energy transition leader Mandy Rambharos recently told Reuters:  “I don’t think we can look at 2050 and still see fossil fuels in there to be honest.” 

The post South Africa’s climate advisers urge faster shift away from fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.

The government launched a consultation on its updated climate plan to run until the end of May, with a view to submit a final document to the UN ahead of the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in November.

Under the draft plan, South Africa will limit its annual greenhouse gas emissions to 398-440 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030. This cuts emissions 28% compared with its 2015 pledge, which capped annual emissions at 614 MtCO2.

It relies on “a very ambitious power sector investment plan” and the implementation of a green transport strategy, energy efficiency programmes and a carbon tax to meet the goal.

“We are not putting up excuses not to do things because there’s Covid-19 pandemic,” Gwede Mantashe, minister of mineral resources and energy, told a summit on climate and development hosted by the UK last week.

Describing the energy transition as “a journey”, Mantasha said: “It is not going to be the stroke of a pen [that] switches off coal power stations and then moves to renewables.”

India calls out rich nations for setting net zero goals over robust short-term targets

Deborah Ramalope, an analyst at Climate Analytics and a former member of the South African delegation to UN climate talks, said the draft plan was “much stronger” than its 2015 commitments but left room for greater ambition.

It is “still not aligned with the Paris Agreement temperature goal” of limiting heating to 1.5C by the end of the century, she told Climate Home News.

Wanjira Mathai, regional director for Africa at the World Resources Institute, applauded the proposed target which would put the country’s efforts in line with limiting temperature to 2C, according to benchmarks by Climate Action Tracker.

She welcomed the inclusion of policies to cope with intensifying climate impacts such as early warning systems, climate-resilient development planning, improved governance, and support for research.

South Africa estimates it will need $8 billion a year from the international community by 2030 to finance its decarbonisation and adaptation efforts – more than three times what it received in recent years. Of the climate finance it accessed in 2018-19, 89% was in loans.

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South Africa’s tighter target was made possible by lower-than-expected greenhouse gas emissions over the past 10 years and a drop in emission intensity, according to the government document.

Saliem Fakir, South-Africa based executive director for the Africa Climate Foundation, said this can be explained through a growth of the service sector and the decline of carbon-intensive heavy-industries.

A sharp rise in electricity tariffs had increased the cost burden on companies and spurred improvements in energy efficiency, he said.

The improved climate plan is “not the result of true ambition,” Fakir told Climate Home News, but rather the side effect of an economic shift towards services.

“This has got nothing to do with an active strategy to bring emissions down. Emissions are still driven by coal,” he added.

State-owned utility Eskom’s coal plants generated 86% of the country’s electricity in 2020, making South Africa the most coal-reliant among G20 economies.

The updated climate plan identifies the electricity sector as a decarbonisation priority for the next decade, while ensuring communities dependent on coal for their livelihoods are guaranteed economic opportunities.

South Africa aims to reach net zero emissions in 2050 – while still burning coal

Campaigners and analysts say the country could decarbonise faster, but is held back by an arbitrary cap on renewable energy deployment. Under its 2019 electricity supply strategy, the government allows for another 1,500MW of coal power capacity to be installed this decade, while restricting solar installations to 1,000MW a year and wind to 1,600MW.

“That is our Achilles heel of climate ambition,” Alex Lenferna, secretary of the Climate Justice Coalition, a network of civil society groups in South Africa, told Climate Home News. “It’s also pretty hard for South Africa to secure green finance when we’re planning on building more coal.”

Hartmut Winkler, of the University of Johannesburg, told Climate Home News there was “no need for a renewable cap” which was creating an artificial barrier to decarbonisation.

“If there was a very clear signal that this country was going to push renewables, there would be absolutely no lack of interests from investors,” he said.

Fakir said the government has sought to keep the coal sector on side with a compromise that still allows for a significant amount of coal in the power mix.

While the government has approved a long-term vision to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, the plan would still allow the country to burn coal with no exit date yet agreed.

“There is a lot of politics going on in the coal sector and vested interests. The term ‘coal mafia’ is used quite often to describe opaque purchasing contracts,” Winkler added.

Meanwhile, a fifth procurement round for 1,600 MW of onshore wind and 1,000 MW of solar energy was announced earlier this month – two years later than planned.

As a result of delayed renewable deployment and ageing coal power stations increasingly taken offline for maintenance, South Africa is experiencing periodic power cuts that Eskom says could last for the next five years.

The post South Africa sets out to tighten 2030 emissions target appeared first on Climate Home News.

South Africa currently produces 3.6% of the world’s coal, as much as Europe, and generates over 90% of its electricity from the fuel, mainly in Apartheid-era power stations in the country’s north-east.

In September, the government said it would aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050 — making South Africa the first major developing economy to embrace that goal. But the plan still allows a place for coal in the energy mix beyond that date.

To achieve the goal, president Cyril Ramaphosa recently set up a Presidential Climate Change Coordinating Commission to advise his government on how to ensure a just and fair transition away from coal for communities and workers dependent on the industry for their livelihoods.

Its members, which include environmentalists, trade unions and business groups, will get together four times a year for five years, form working groups and come up with recommendations to government, business and civil society. 

Speaking to Climate Home News, commission members are anticipating conflict over the pace of transition, how to reskill fossil fuel workers and whether more methane gas will be needed to provide power while coal is phased out and renewables are rolled out.

John Kerry promises ‘significantly’ more climate finance at adaptation summit

Among the six climate campaigners on the 22-strong commission, Bobby Peek, director of Groundwork South Africa, and Greenpeace Africa political adviser Happy Khambule told Climate Home they would argue for a much faster coal phaseout.

“The [government’s] Low Emissions Development Strategy spoke about post-2050, so 2060 closest, and we think that’s nonsense. That’s just pushing the goal posts,” said Khambule. “We’re thinking quite soon.”

Khambule wants the government to adopt a hard phaseout date and an “actual just transition plan” by the time the country submits its next climate plan under the Paris Agreement around 2023-25. 

Most of the country’s coal-fired power plants are operated by a state-owned firm called Eskom. Mandy Rambharos, who heads Eskom’s just energy transition work, told Climate Home that “for now,” the utility was following the government’s 2019 resources strategy. It forecasts CO2 emissions from electricity generation to grow until 2025 as two new coal power stations are brought online, then plateau between 2025 and 2035 before declining.

Eskom will reduce emissions faster if it can do so without negatively impacting jobs or energy capacity, Rambharos said. The pace of transition will depend how quickly they can get renewables up and running, she added.

As US renews climate relations with EU and China, carbon pricing raises tensions

But coal mining companies and unions are expected to resist a faster coal phase-out. Trade unions have three representatives on the commission, while business associations which include fossil fuel companies have two.

Among them is Joanne Yawitch, CEO of the National Business Initiative, whose members include coal mining firms Anglo-American and Exxaro. Yawitch recently praised the companies’ transition plans and told Cape Talk radio: “We will be mining coal for some time to come in South Africa”.

For Bobby Peek, of NGO Groundwork South Africa, resistance from unions and coal workers is inevitable. “You can’t blame and you can’t just discard that resistance. We must remember that, for our sins, the South African economy was set up to get cheap, black labour to dig out coal, gold and platinum in very dangerous situations.”

“People rely on this, despite it being a harmful economy,” he added, “and now to say to people that we’re going to stop this only livelihood you know and we’re going to shift. It’s a lot because people rely on it… but we know that when a mining company leaves an area, they don’t leave that town wealthy, they leave that town dead. You can speak about South Africa, the Zambian copper belt, Congo, Chile, Peru, India. It’s the same all over.”

Rambharos said Eskom’s modelling shows that, although there won’t be a 1:1 job replacement, a transition to solar and wind could create more jobs than it would lose. The analysis doesn’t include any manufacturing of renewable equipment.

Inner Mongolia pursues coal-led recovery, defying Beijing’s climate goals

Ultimately, the transition will require re-training coal workers. Eskom’s coal turbine engineers could be reskilled to work on renewable turbines and coal miners could work in gold or platinum mines, Rambharos said.

Khambule, of Greenpeace, warned that all mining jobs are dangerous and are being lost because of automation. There is “lack of vision” if all Eskom sees is “black bodies… mining the hell of anything that’s available,” he said.

In 2019, there were 51 deaths in South Africa’s mining industry which mining minister Gwede Mantashe described as a record low. “From coal to gold, it’s death,” Khambule said.

Instead, he pointed to the US, where coal miners are learning to code and to Spain’s just transition plan and added that South Africa’s coal areas are also good for agriculture and tourism. “The jobs are there,” he said.

The committee is also likely to argue over whether methane gas should be used as a ‘transition fuel’. Rambharos said that in order to avoid power cuts while shutting down coal and rolling out renewables “we might have to look at bring in some natural gas”. 

Khambule opposed this. “We don’t have the luxury to jump from one fossil fuel to the next,” he said. 

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Ramaphosa’s African National Congress party was returned to office with a reduced majority in an election earlier this month. While climate change was barely mentioned in the campaign, the result allows the government to finally implement a tax that has been under discussion since 2010.

“Climate change represents one of the biggest challenges facing human kind, and the primary objective of the carbon tax is to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in a sustainable, cost effective and affordable manner,” the treasury said in a statement.

The tax is to start at 120 rand a tonne of CO2 ($8). In the first phase, polluters will get 60-95% of carbon allowances free, bringing the effective tax rate down to R6-48/t. These rates are to be reviewed before phase two, spanning 2023-30.

EU plans first satellite fleet to monitor CO2 in every country

South Africa relies on coal for most of its energy. Politically, the priority for the electricity sector has been to tackle rolling blackouts and state-owned utility Eskom’s mountain of debt.

The government’s blueprint for the sector to 2030 includes 1GW of coal capacity already in planning, before pivoting to gas, nuclear and renewables. It foresees adding 8.1GW of gas, 2.5GW of nuclear 2.5GW of hydropower, 5.7GW of solar and 8.1GW of wind, in the latest iteration reported by industry publication Go Legal.

Meanwhile the mining sector, a major employer, is struggling with unreliable power and high labour costs. Anglo American Platinum complained last month the carbon tax would cost them R50m ($3.4m) in the first two years. Such concerns are behind years of delay and concessions to big emitters.

Campaigners welcomed the price on pollution, but said it needed to get higher to clean up the country’s economy.

“We commend the president for putting wheels to this long overdue issue,” said Morné du Plessis, head of WWF South Africa. “During the second phase, we will have to ramp up our transition ambitions significantly.”

Climate Action Tracker rates South Africa’s climate targets “highly insufficient”.

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The tax will start at 120 rand ($8) a tonne of carbon dioxide, although various free allocations reduce the effective rate to R6-54/t, depending on the industry.

In his budget speech on Wednesday, finance minister Tito Mboweni also announced funds to restructure ailing state-owned utility Eskom, which owns most of the country’s coal plants.

“The sustainability challenge affects us all. Climate change is real. The steps being undertaken at Eskom will allow us to expand renewable energy, and the carbon tax will come into effect from 1 June 2019,” said Mboweni.

The bill needs to be rubber-stamped by the National Council of Provinces and the president before it becomes law.

A carbon tax was first proposed in 2010, then repeatedly delayed by industry pushback and broader political inertia. The rate at which it increases has been scaled down from 10% a year in the initial plan to 2% above inflation.

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Climate experts said the introduction of a carbon price was significant but its immediate impact would be limited.

“South Africa re-committing in the 2019 budget speech to implementing its carbon tax by June 2019 is a welcome and key step forward,” said Patrick Curran of LSE, who has been tracking the policy since its inception. “However, according to the South African government’s own analysis, the current design of the tax is too low and will not do enough to meet the country’s nationally determined contributions submitted under the Paris Agreement.”

He added: “It is crucial that the tax rate is strengthened in future reviews, starting in 2022, to support meeting South Africa’s national and global climate change objectives. This has to be accompanied by a range of supporting policies, such as greater investment in renewable energy.”

Harald Winkler, energy and climate policy professor at the University of Cape Town, took a similar view. He also urged the government to invest the carbon tax revenues in expanding access to clean energy and retraining coal workers.

“Yes, we have to make this transition away from coal and towards renewables, but there are workers and communities that depend on the coal value chain,” he said. “Those [carbon tax] revenues should be used to make sure the poor are not worse off.”

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South Africa gets some 90% of its electricity and two-thirds of total energy from coal, a high emissions source. As its contribution to the Paris Agreement, it committed to peak emissions between 2020 and 2025, then plateau for around a decade and decline.

Since that 2015 pledge, wind and solar power generators have started to undercut new coal plants on price, disrupting Eskom’s coal-heavy monopoly.

At the same time, citizens face rolling blackouts as ageing, poorly maintained coal plants fail to meet demand.

Eskom, the main utility, is undergoing a restructure to separate its debt-laden generation business from its grid and distribution arms. Mboweni announced a R69 billion ($4.8bn) bailout package, contingent on the power company slashing costs. “Pouring money directly into Eskom in its current form is like pouring money into a sieve,” said the finance minister.

Winkler said the restructure was “good news for renewables” because independent power producers could deal with Eskom’s grid operation, rather than the monopoly generator.

Following on from the carbon tax, South Africa is developing a framework climate law, to build the institutions to monitor and manage emissions across economic sectors.

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The draft bill, open for comments until 8 August, sets out institutional arrangements for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

It does not specify legally binding targets but cites the country’s submission to the Paris Agreement, which aims for greenhouse gases to peak by 2025, plateau for a decade, then decline.

“The purpose of the bill is to build an effective climate change response and ensure the long-term, just transition to a climate resilient and lower carbon economy and society,” Edna Molewa’s environment ministry said in a statement. It held a stakeholder engagement meeting on Tuesday.

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South Africa is among the world’s twenty biggest emitters. Climate Action Tracker flags its Paris pledge red for “highly insufficient”.

One of its biggest challenges is shifting away from coal, which is mined for export as well as dominating power generation.

Nearly 12GW of new coal plants were in planning or construction phases in January, according to Coal Swarm’s global database. These include Thabametsi and Khanyisa, which researchers from the University of Cape Town say are no longer needed amid declining demand.

climatechangebill2018_gn41689 by Karl Mathiesen on Scribd

Ahmed Mokgopo, campaigner with climate network 350 Africa, said government pro-coal policies contradicted the goals of the climate bill and South Africa’s international commitments. “In determining what is fair and equitable in drafting the climate change bill, no new coal should be built, ever,” he said.

Wind and solar power started to undercut new coal plants on price years ago, but renewable energy deployment faces resistance from trade unions over the loss of mining jobs.

State utility Eskom eventually signed power purchase agreements with 27 renewable generation projects in April, after a two-year delay. Energy minister Jeff Radebe announced a new bidding round earlier this month.

While the proposed climate law does not directly address the energy mix, it requires “every organ of the state” to coordinate on curbing emissions and preparing for climate change impacts.

Harald Winkler, climate and energy professor at the University of Cape Town, said: “Overall, providing a legal basis for climate action is an important milestone. However, many details in the bill require careful consideration and some will require strengthening.”

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On Thursday, China Development Bank (CDB) announced the loan to Eskom, South Africa’s power utility, on 6 July to fund the completion of its 4,764 MW Medupi coal plant.

Two days later, a G20 climate action plan, released at the Hamburg summit and agreed by the Chinese leader Xi, called on multilateral development banks (MDBs) to offer “coordinated support for country driven long-term strategies for low greenhouse gas emissions”.

The CBD is not a multilateral bank and therefore not technically covered by the G20 plan’s call. But it is a state-run institution, using public money. The divide is evidence of China’s willingness to talk the talk internationally, while continuing to export fossil fuel finance.

China has repeatedly reaffirmed its decision to abide by the Paris climate agreement by moving towards reducing carbon emissions. It has also tried to build a climate leadership partnership with the EU.

However, Chinese companies, backed by government money, continue to invest in fossil fuels in Africa. Two high profile cases in recent months are the Eskom deal and the controversial coal project in Lamu, Kenya. Between 2010 and 2020, according to the International Energy Agency, 20% of new Chinese-backed power capacity in sub-Saharan Africa will be coal.

EU-China: New ‘climate leaders’ are also enamoured of fossil fuels

According to Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe, the World Bank initially funded the coal plant but it had said that this was the last funding Eskom would receive for a project of this kind.

“The World Bank said the rest of the world was moving towards renewable energies and that is what they would like to focus on in the future,” Phasiwe told Climate Home.

Now, after a shortfall left the project in doubt, China’s development bank has jumped in to fill the gap.

Although Climate Home could not reach CDB for comment, its deputy director-general manager, Li Gang, told a press conference in Johannesburg that the loan demonstrated a long-term relationship growing between China and Africa.

“We believe as long as Eskom does everything well, and fulfils its commitment to the community and the people and ensures that the goals of the country and the government are achieved, CDB will be their strongest supporter,” said Li.

The World Bank and other multilateral banks face ongoing criticism for continuing to fund fossil fuel projects in developing countries. A recent report by the US-based NGO Bank Information Centre (BIC), accused the World Bank of undermining its climate commitments by supporting investment incentives for coal, gas and oil projects.

In a press statement, BIC Europe and Central Asia manager, Nezir Sinan said the World Bank had pledged to help countries adopt a low-carbon development path specifically by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies and promoting a carbon tax. “However, the bank’s policy lending does the opposite by introducing tax breaks for coal power plants and coal export infrastructure,” said Sinan.

The G20 climate action plan emphasised the role such organisations can play in a safer climate.

“MDBs’ ability to provide large-scale financing, their potential to leverage private climate finance, and their presence around the globe place them in a good position to contribute to the transition to an increased adaptive capacity and a low greenhouse gas emission and climate-resilient development,” it read.

Eskom’s Phasiwe defended the World Bank funding for Medupi, arguing that power station was initiated way before many countries started shifting towards renewable energies and before the bank itself pledged to end its financing of coal.

“Medupi was started in 2006,” he said: “It’s not like Eskom is investing in a new coal project.” The World Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

Report: Kenya signs China deal for coal plant beside Unesco site

Phasiwe said Medupi was the last coal project that Eskom would invest in, adding the company was increasingly investing in renewable energies which for now make only 5% of the company’s power supply. Coal accounts for 80%.

“We come from a situation where 100% of our power was generated from coal but now we’re diversifying our energy sources in terms of the government’s energy mix strategy,” said Phasiwe.   

He said Eskom has realised the need to embrace renewable energies and, as a result, the power utility has partnered with Stellenbosch Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies, which is researching how to store solar energy.

“We don’t want to be left in the dark,” he said.

Although a developing country with little responsibility for historic emissions, South Africa’s carbon footprint which is driven by its energy sector owing to its growing economy is a cause for concern.

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At one abandoned site, mining infrastructure sits partially submerged and rusting in a large pool formed among exposed mine waste. Smoke pours from a nearby hill as a fire rages out-of-control in the tunnels below.

The wreckage belongs to Golfview Mining (Pty) Ltd, part of Anker Coal and Mineral Holdings South Africa (Pty) Ltd, which in turn is part of the Anker group based in the Netherlands. But rather than finish cleaning up Vos’ land, Golfview is looking to sell.

Sights like this are increasingly common in South Africa. As the global market for coal slowly declines, slimmer margins are forcing international mining companies, including majors BHP Billiton and Anglo American, to shed their coal assets.

Documents obtained from the country’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) by Climate Home reveal a small minority of mining companies hold the majority of the country’s funds for rehabilitation. However, these big miners rarely apply for, and are almost never granted, closure certificates, the documents needed to legally close a mine and pass remaining liability to the government. Instead, junior miners, such as Golfview, are left with the remnants of mines and insufficient funds to properly clean up when the resource is exhausted.

The ground near the Golfview mine cracks and smokes from a fire burning uncontrollably in a mine tunnel below. (Photo: Mark Olalde)

Increasingly mines are simply abandoned, leaving a legacy of local and global pollution. Every year, South Africa’s coal mines – operational and abandoned – are estimated to release greenhouse pollution equivalent to 900,000 cars.

Proper rehabilitation of mines includes backfilling and sealing old shafts, halting the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. If miners simply walk away, said David Hallowes, a coal researcher at the South African non-profit groundWork, “you’ve just got a total catastrophe in the making”.

A decade ago, six companies mined 90% of the coal sold in South Africa. The eight largest mines produced more than 60% of total output.

Coal power pipeline shrinks dramatically in boon for climate

Since then, shifting commodities prices, competition with renewables and conflict with Eskom – the continent’s largest electricity producer – have prompted a cascade of mine sales to progressively smaller companies.

Between 2006 and 2016, the number of operational coal mines in South Africa increased from 93 to 148, a 59% jump. However, coal production only increased by about 10%, indicating a shift to smaller mines.

In May 2015, BHP completed a demerger in which it spun off many of its assets perceived as being lower value, including South African coal, to South32. BHP did not respond to requests for comment.

At Golfview’s mines near Ermelo, operations ceased after the price of coal steadily declined for several years, and the company is looking to sell its mining rights and related liability.

In 2012, the company accepted a plea agreement and fine for environmental transgressions while mining in 2009 and 2010. Golfview since entered business rescue, similar to bankruptcy, and, according to Vos, stopped paying for the use of his land as well as the subcontractors who did the actual mining. Now, illegal miners are the only ones still digging coal from the mine.

A small-scale miner illegally mines in an underground portion of the abandoned Golfview mine.
(Photo: Mark Olalde)

Earlier this month, Eskom announced it would shutter several coal-fired power stations in South Africa. Xavier Prevost, senior coal analyst at South African mining consulting firm XMP Consulting, said China’s shift away from coal had impacted coal exports worldwide.

“Indonesia, the largest coal exporter, lost entire markets. Australia had the same fate. Large companies like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Glencore have closed and sold coal mines,” said Prevost.

In South Africa, Eskom calls on its coal suppliers to be 51% black-owned, a standard smaller companies are finding much easier to meet than international mining houses.

Anglo American sent a statement to Climate Home in which company spokespeople said that Anglo “initiated a process to exit its Eskom-tied mines”.

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“Anglo American has been steadily upgrading its portfolio since 2013 by disposing of lower margin, shorter life assets, while bringing on stream higher margin, long life projects. This took place through 2014, 2015 and 2016 and has continued in the first few months of 2017,” the statement said.

This raises the prospect, said Hallowes, that an industrial crisis could become an environmental one. “As you go to smaller and smaller mines and less capitalized firms, the ability to do [rehabilitation] is heavily eroded.”

South Africa has progressive environmental legislation meant to safeguard against future impacts of mining. Before a company can break ground, it must put up financial provisions for mine closure in the form of trust funds, cash guarantees or bank guarantees. Similar to a security deposit on a rented apartment, these provisions cannot be used by the companies to rehabilitate, but the money is returned if closure is completed properly. If not, the government has the right to appropriate the money and use it for rehabilitation.

Coal mining infrastructure rusts in Anker Coal’s abandoned Golfview mine. (Photo: Mark Olalde)

According to the government, there is less than $3.5bn in financial provisions for rehabilitation around the country. Only 60% of operating mines held sufficient rehabilitation funds in 2012/13, according to the Department of Environmental Affairs, in part because the guidelines for calculating rehabilitation funds have not been updated since 2005.

While the DMR said in a statement that it had dipped into financial provisions to rehabilitate, it did not provide examples.

DMR records, collected by Climate Home, reveal these funds are rarely disbursed, as closure certificates are infrequently issued. The records suggest no large coal mines have been officially closed since at least 2011.

When large companies, such as BHP and Anglo, did apply for and were granted closure certificates, the certificates were for prospecting rights, which cover a less-invasive search for minerals.

“Once a mine has been officially closed, the liability of that mine goes to the DMR and that is not a liability they want, so they are extremely reluctant to put an official stamp on closing mines,” Hallowes said.

The government said that whether funds are handed over during the sale of a mine depends on the terms of individual sales. The DMR said in a statement: “The department’s role is to ensure that the state is not exposed to the risk of inheriting environmental liability in the long run.” Anglo American said it always transfers its financial provisions when selling mines.

With the government focused on avoiding liability, big miners are turning to smaller companies to purchase their operations and work them until closure or abandonment. While the break up and sale of mines slowly advances across the country, the majority of funds for rehabilitation remain held by large mining houses.

Small mines usually have insufficient provisions for clean up. Records from KwaZulu-Natal, a province with a number of coal mines, show 95% of mines are covered by just 20% of all funds held for rehabilitation. This leaves them with an average clean up provision of $18,365 per mine. A prospecting right for coal in Ekurhuleni, the eastern suburbs of Johannesburg, held just $28 for rehabilitation.

On and around Vos’ farm in Mpumalanga, Golfview’s business rescue plan shows that rehabilitation is estimated at slightly more than $2.2 million, but only $385,000 is available in trust funds. The business rescue practitioner did not respond to requests for comment, although the plan calls for the sale of assets and parts of the mining rights.

Johan Vos stands atop a pile of waste from an abandoned coal mine on his property and surveys his surrounding farm. (Photo: Mark Olalde)

Sonita Kruger is the safety, security, health and environmental logistics manager at Anker Coal. She said part of the company’s operation was rehabilitated while another section was 80% completed before the landowner began denying the company access.

“We did do a closure cost assessment of Golfview, we did, and we did a comprehensive rehabilitation plan, which was submitted to the DMR. There are funds available to do the rehabilitation,” Kruger said.

The plan states that the business rescue practitioner, employees and creditors will be the first to receive a cut of proceeds. Liabilities are listed at nearly $48m, meaning much of that would need to be paid before additional funds could be directed toward rehabilitation.

“Yeah, they’re going to give you a couple bucks, but it’s not enough because that piece of land is going to be sterilised for a hundred years, maybe more,” Vos said.

With little hope of large portions of his farm being economically viable again, Vos considered selling. Potential buyers were not interested in land marked by the remnants of coal mining. “My hands are chopped off. I can do nothing,” Vos said.

Mark Olalde’s work in South Africa is financially supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting and the Fund for Environmental Journalism.

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But it has a problem. The small victim is alive. Its desperate calls are attracting the attention of other predators and the cheetah has no energy left.

In the 39C heat, the cheetah needs at least half an hour to recharge after the burst of speed. That normally means hunching down so the ground compresses its chest, speeding up recovery. But two hyenas have come to see what the commotion is, driving the cheetah away.

Its failure is a temperature problem. The cheetah’s evolutionary advantage is its ability to clock 110km/h over a few hundred metres. But increasing temperatures increase the costs of these bursts. It’s such an acute obstacle that cheetah will not run when the temperature passes 50C.

In the southern section of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, the temperature has been rising for the last few decades. The park predicts that the average will rise by 3C from pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and double that by 2100. Days when the temperature passes 40C and hovers close to 50C are expected to enter the double digits each year.

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That’s not just a problem for cheetah. A few hours and a hundred kilometres later, at Skukuza – the park’s main administration hub – the temperature is 42C.

Its records show that in the first few months of this year, when the drought was at its worst, almost no rain fell. Sabie River, which forms the camp’s one boundary, shrunk to a trickle. Now Skukuza is covered in a lush green, from the grass at its golf course to the leafy acacia trees. Heavy, but intermittent, rains in the last two months have broken the back of two years of drought.

For the scientists based at the camp, it was a harrowing time but also a great chance to gather data. Izak Smit, science manager for systems ecology, GIS and remote sensing for Kruger, says drought is a common occurrence in the park – South Africa’s largest animal sanctuary. The last bad one was in 1991, when 16,000 buffalo died. “We learnt from that,” he says.

Working with people upstream on rivers like Sabie, the park made sure that everyone reduced water use so everyone had a share. But that hasn’t stopped hundreds of animals dying, particularly those that graze for their food. He says that “SANParks adheres to a limited intervention approach,” which means nature must take its course.

Rivers slowed to a trickle in the drought (Pic: Flickr/Armin Rodler)

The north of the park, which has traditionally been drier and fed by fewer rivers was worst hit. Officials killed 350 hippo and buffalo to ease the pressure on water resources. The meat was given to communities living on the boundaries of the park, who lost two maize harvests to the drought.

Temperatures at Skukuza have been monitored since 1960. The last December, January and March were among the hottest months recorded in the last five decades. Between July 2015 and June 2016, 28 days surpassed the 40C mark – only eight were that hot during the 1991 drought.

Africa files: Climate change is testing southern Africa water agreements

That increasing heat is going according to climate predictions for this north-eastern part of South Africa, bordering Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Alarm bells started ringing in 2001, when the first comprehensive research on climate impacts for the park was done by the South African National Biodiversity Agency. This calculated that temperatures would rise by an average of 3C by mid-century. That would make the northern half drier, while the south would get wetter but would receive most of this rain in short and violent spells.

Plants and animals would be unable to move ahead of the change, the agency warned, predicting it would kill off 59% of mammals, 40% of birds, 70% of butterflies, 80% of other invertebrates, and 45% of reptiles.

In 2008, then environment and tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk warned: “The damage done to one of South Africa’s most celebrated conservation areas could be shattering.”

A hippo in the Sabie river (Pic: Flickr/Michael7070)

Those projections were calculated on a business-as-usual scenario. New climate projections, factoring in adaptation plans and the possibility of lower global greenhouse gas emission, see these numbers roughly halved. But that is only if the measures are put in place.

Stefani Freitag-Ronaldson, general manager of scientific services at the park, says the observable climate change has been gathering pace at the park. “We are seeing quite fundamental changes in when it rains and what sorts of temperature we get at different parts of the year.”

While the winter in this part of the lowveld is normally mild – the park sits on the Tropic of Capricorn – it has been getting increasingly warm. “A park is necessarily an artificial boundary for species but the ones inside our fences are generally adapted to the conditions.”

That means the animals thrive in the humid heat, growing in numbers so that they survive the periodic droughts, she says. “But now the overall conditions are starting to change and where species cannot move to keep track with that, they will struggle to survive.”

High and dry: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched

For large animals, like hippo and buffalo, their sensitivity to change – especially with predictions of more frequent and prolonged drought – means they don’t do well in any of the future scenarios modelled by the park’s scientific teams.

But the people tasked with observing the incremental changes in climate in the park – its rangers – have their hands full with another task. Kruger has around 9,000 white rhino, 40% of the world’s remaining number. That makes the park an enticing target for poachers. Over 800 were killed last year.

Poaching footsoldiers are easily recruited in villages, normally across the border in Mozambique, thanks to the drought taking away their livestock and crops. Less vegetation in the park then makes their job easier, with rhino forced to use the small number of waterholes that still had water during the drought. December is the busiest month of the year, something rangers link to the poacher’s desire to have extra spending money for Christmas.

Kruger has mobilised a massive effort to curb this. Skukuza is home to helicopters, drones, spotter planes and tracking dogs. A wide area surveillance system – the Postcode Meerkat – was just launched to track human movement in the park. The army also operates in the area.

Rangers on patrol (Pic: Flickr/Bernard Dupont)

All that effort takes time away from conservation. A ranger based in Phalaborwa, five hours north, says their anti-poaching work necessarily creates blindspots. “We used to walk this park and know how everything was doing. Each ranger had their section and knew it like the back of their hand.”

That meant they could record how climactic changes were changing things as small as dung beetles. Now the rangers are being trained to use drones and conduct surveillance operations so that they can ambush and disarm poachers. This ranger says: “I feel for our park now because we obviously overlook some problems, especially when you see that things are changing in the environment.”

Their worry is one privately shared by officials in the park when they talk about the looming changes wrought by a changing climate.

Report: South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit

South Africa is, per capita, one of the 20 highest carbon emitters in the world. Its contribution to the Paris climate deal is “inadequate” and “not consistent with limiting warming below 2C” according to NGO Climate Action Tracker. The country is building the two biggest dry-cooled, coal-fired, power stations in the world.

While the Paris Agreement puts the world on a cooler trajectory than business-as-usual, the national contributions do not tot up big enough carbon cuts to stay within 2C.

For Kruger National Park, it means change will come too fast for many species to adapt.

Animals under pressure

Mountain gorilla: This is a species that should be an example of how to cover all your bases when it comes to climate change. They eat 140 different species of plant so can survive a lot of change. But their central Africa range has been overrun by human settlements, with only 800 now left in the wild. As climate change and population growth puts more pressure on these settlements, projections are that hunting will increase and their habitat will be cut and burnt.

 African elephant: Elephants have adapted well to live across the continent, surviving in nearly 40 countries. They eat all sorts of plant species and live in both wet and arid conditions. But they need 300 litres of water a day to survive and their reproduction is linked to rainfall. Populations in central Africa – where more rain means they should actually be safe from the worst of climate change – are being decimated by poaching, while their safer strongholds in southern Africa will become inhospitable with increasing drought and heatwaves.

Giraffe: The population has shrunk 40% in the last 30 years – some 60,000 giraffes – according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s latest “red list” of endangered species. The union blames habitat loss through farming and deforestation, as well as hunting for meat during armed conflict. Their demise is a study in how the less valuable a species is for tourism, the harder it is for governments to justify their survival.

Cheetah: Numbers have dropped 30% to 7,500 in the last 40-years. They used to range the continent, but have been hemmed into small areas thanks to human expansion and their perceived threat to livestock. For rural communities, cattle, sheep and goats are more valuable than wildlife and cheetah are a threat. That means they have to survive in wildlife reserves, where they must compete with lion and hyena for food. Their speed means they can get to prey quickly, but they overheat quickly and then struggle to defend their catch from other predators. They also do not run when temperatures pass 50C, a temperature that will become increasingly normal in places like the Kruger National Park.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

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Fed by the Muene River, it provides a livelihood for hundreds of fishermen as well as the small industries that support the local tourists that flock to the dam when it is full.

But the river and dam have become increasingly polluted, with locals pointing the finger at the source of the river: the Zimbabwean city of Mutare some 50 kilometres to the west.

A dumpsite in Mutare’s Nyakamete industrial area sits on the spot where the Muene starts. Waste from industries, clinics and homes in Mutare gets dumped at the site.

The up to 50C heat in that city helps break down and decompose the waste, so chemicals and other liquids seep into the river.

By the time it reaches Chicamba Dam, it is so polluted that locals blame it for cholera outbreaks and sudden deaths in the fish population.

Africa files: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched

Authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province, which contains the dam, set up a task force in 2009 to investigate the cause of the cholera and other water-related health problems. It concluded that Mutare’s dumpsite was to blame, and asked that city to fix the problem. Mutare’s city council said it didn’t have the money to find another way to dispose of the problem, so effectively ignored the complaints.

But the situation has intensified with the ongoing drought. Less water in the river means a higher concentration of pollutants. Low levels in the Chicamba Dam also mean that old concentrations of chemicals – which normally sink to the bottom of large water bodies – have mixed into the little water that is left.

That ongoing drought – the worst in southern Africa in 35 years – has created all sorts of similar conflicts. Mozambique has lodged complaints with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) about polluted water from South African mining killing crocodiles and fish. That water has also killed animals in South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park, one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in the world.

This is a problem in a region where rivers form borders and care little for political considerations. The colonial divvying-up of the region in the late 1800s saw rivers become convenient borders. Twelve SADC states share 21 river basins, with most of these crossing more than two countries.

Cases such as that of the Muene River are often left unresolved. If bilateral discussions do not work, states lodge their complaints with the SADC secretariat. It then recommends that the offending party stop the offending activity. But there is nothing in the way of censure.

That lack of political intervention can create decades of conflict. Botswana and Namibia still trade hostile words over the Sedudu Island, on the border between the two countries and Zambia. Stuck in the middle of the Chobe River, which then flows into the Zambezi River, its legal status was left in a grey area after the 1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty. This treaty between Germany and Great Britain settled border disputes between their colonies, but gave little in the way of detail.

It set the Chobe River as the border between Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. Both countries claimed the river, and deployed soldiers. Several firefights ensued in the 1990s, without SADC being able to resolve the dispute. Botswana went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 1999 that the island belongs to the country.

But the current drought has rekindled the conflict. With less water in the Chobe River, Namibian fishermen have been forced to cast their nets further towards the Botswana side and Sedudu Island. Namibia still claims access. Several Namibians have been shot by the Botswana army in recent years, with 14 arrested last year for illegal fishing. Botswana – a landlocked nation – now has small naval patrol vessels to maintain its control over the river.

Africa files: South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit

That same 1890 treaty has created over a century of deadlock between Namibia and South Africa. It set their border as the Orange River, which flows between the two countries for 600 kilometres.

South Africa holds that the border is on the highwater mark on the Namibian side, which means that country cannot use the water. In an arid region with virtually no rainfall, that means large tracts of irrigated farmland and vineyards on the South African side of the Orange and little on the northern, Namibian, side.

Namibia argues that the border is in the middle of the river, according to international best practice. But the country was a South African colony for 60-years and relies on its larger southern neighbour for trade and food imports, so has little political capital to force its way.

The dispute has, however, driven a shift in the water politics of southern Africa. In the past the country with the strongest army and economy would do what it would with water. That’s why the Limpopo River, which flows through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, has 44 dams with 26 of those in South Africa.

Stuck without a say in the Orange River, Namibia pushed for the creation of the Orange-Senqu Commission in the early 2000s. This brought South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Lesotho together in a body that would discuss how water is shared along the 2 000-kilometre long river.

With a crippling drought wiping out crops and threatening its capital of Windhoek with shortages, Namibia has tried to get access to more water. But it has failed. In practice, South Africa uses its economic clout to keep the status quo.

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That status quo – and hegemony over water resources – has been decades in the making. Each agreement that the country signs on transboundary water sharing leans in its favour, ensuring more water can be used on the South African side.

To ensure enough water comes in, South Africa has spent three decades involved in Lesotho’s politics to ensure the security of the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme. This has seen dams built in the Mountain Kingdom to collect its bountiful rainfall. That then flows to Gauteng – South Africa’s industrial heart.

But the scheme almost never existed. Negotiations in the early 1980s to allow construction to go ahead were stopped when Lesotho’s Prime Minister turned to the West for aid, something the isolated apartheid regime did not appreciate. The scheme was put on hold. But a coup in 1986 removed the Prime Minister and the highlands scheme treaty was signed 10-months later. People in Lesotho still complain about its terms, which provide cheap water to South Africa when water is the most valuable resource in the region.

Two years after the scheme started working, in 1998, a coup in Lesotho threatened the new water resource. The country’s Prime Minister, whom the army had turned on, asked SADC for help. Botswana and South Africa immediately mobilised 1,500 soldiers. Their stated goal was to “create a safe environment”, through “securing and controlling” several key facilities in Lesotho. These included “power and water supply facilities” – the highlands water scheme. Katse Dam, the centerpiece of that scheme, was the setting of intense fighting with several soldiers killed.

Water pollution threatens crocodiles (Pic: Flickr/Ramy Alaa)

That action has been used as a case study for water relationships between big and small countries. South Africa has consequently been accused of using its military to secure its water supply. International publications at the time dubbed the contested intervention a “water war”.

But a similar crisis in 2015 signaled the changing nature of SADC water and regional politics. With a drought crippling the region and South African dams dropping to record lows, South Africa intervened politically to settle the dispute. One of the threats raised during the crisis by opposition parties in Lesotho was for a renegotiation of the price at which South Africa buys water from the highlands scheme. This threat died out with the settlement.

South Africa’s armed forces have used interventions like Lesotho to create scenarios that are specifically focused on securing water resources.

In pictures: the citizen scientists tracking Kenya’s water woes

Climate projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and local bodies such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) warn that competition for this one resource will drive conflict in the future. The IPCC has said that decreasing rainfall and the changing climate will be a “threat multiplier” for armed conflict in the region. The CSIR has warned as recently as this year that more attention needs to be given to transboundary water agreements so that there are tools in place when “water scarcity forces communities to compete for resources”.

The current drought has seen this happen in isolated cases. Several instances in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have seen people killing each other for access to scarce water resources. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says 40 million people are “acutely food insecure” in southern Africa.

The two to three-year drought is being heralded as a window on the near future. The IPCC predicts that temperatures in the region will be up to 3C hotter than pre-industrial levels by 2050. Rainfall will increasingly come in short and violent storms, evaporating or running off quickly rather than sinking into the ground.

History says that this will drive violent contestation of water resources. But an increasing maturity in water sharing agreements in southern Africa could ensure this future does not come to pass.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

The post Climate change is testing southern Africa water agreements appeared first on Climate Home News.

They will also use up water in areas that are already water stressed, at a time when the country is toying with its third year of drought.

The minister’s decision came on the second day of the COP22 UN climate summit in Marrakech, where South Africa is negotiating on the nuts and bolts of how the UN’s Paris climate agreement will play out.

This put countries on the same path to ensuring that global warming is kept below 2C on pre-industrial levels. As part of the Africa group, South Africa has consistently argued that the goal should be 1.5C because anything more is catastrophic for the continent.

Projections by the World Bank show that average global warming is doubled in Africa’s interior, while the continent has little capacity to adapt to that change.

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But South Africa has been roundly criticised for its actions not matching up to its rhetoric. It ratified the Paris Agreement in early November, and has a wide range of local initiatives to lower emissions and help people adapt to climate change.

Its Nationally Determined Agreement – the climate plan it submitted to the UN last year – has, however, been called out as not being ambitious enough.

Analysts at Climate Action Tracker rated the contribution as “inadequate”, saying: “It is not consistent with limiting warming below 2C.” The contribution is so vague as to allow South Africa to increase its emissions by anywhere between 20% and 82% on 1990 levels. That translates to either 198-million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 614-million tonnes.

This goal stems from South Africa’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to reduce emissions on business-as-usual levels by 42% by 2025. Climate Action Tracker said: “If most other countries follow South Africa’s approach, global warming would exceed 3-4C.”

Kriel, a small town in the Nkangala district, is located just outside of Eskom’s Kriel Power Station and several coal mines. The town is geographically located in close proximity to a dozen coal power stations. 2014/04/16 (Photo: Styler Reid)

Whether it’s the upper target, or the lower target, that is reached is down to the choices made in South Africa’s power sector. This is responsible for half of the country’s carbon emissions of just under 450-million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, according to the local Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Those decisions are made at the Department of Energy. It has been pushing for a new nuclear build, to replace the ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations that are run by the state-owned utility Eskom.

But, at the same time, it has called for bids from private companies to build coal-fired power stations. This borrows from the platform for bids that was created for South Africa’s 6 000MW independent renewable energy build.

Once that department invites bids, it is up to companies to sketch out their environment impacts and get authorisation from the Department of Environment Affairs. It is the granting of these authorisations that civil society group groundWork objected to.

#Africa files: dedicated coverage of the continent’s climate challenge

The new coal-fired power stations are a product of an age when coal was profligate and climate agreements hadn’t made them unpalatable. Medupi and Kusile were laid down in the mid-2000’s so they could fill the gap when South Africa’s older power stations started decommissioning in the 2020s.

The need for even more stations then came about as a result of the panic from the country’s rolling blackouts in 2009. The national energy plan – the Integrated Resource Plan 2010 – envisioned more coal, built quickly, to ensure this never happened again.

But that plan has not been updated to keep track with climate agreements, and price changes for renewables. An update will be released later this year, but leaked versions show that it heavily favours an expansion of South Africa’s nuclear capacity at the cost cost of renewable options.

Most media reports link this to a political drive for nuclear, linked with the patronage that stems from large industrial builds. That would see 9 600-megawatts of nuclear capacity added to the country’s sole nuclear plant at Koeberg in the Western Cape.

That nuclear imperative is at odds with the best science for what should replace baseload in South Africa. Research released last week by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Energy Centre argued for a mix of renewables and peaking plants.

Thanks to its high levels of solar radiation, and coastal wind, these two options – backed up by gas or diesel open cycle turbines – could create a stable grid. Critically, this mix would also provide electricity cheaper than nuclear or coal, saving five-billion pounds a year in energy costs.

Report: US, EU offer to help African countries deliver climate plans

A previous objection to the granting of an environmental authorisation for Thabametsi, an independent coal-fired power station, resulted in the environment minister telling the mine to do a climate change impact assessment. This was a first for South Africa.

But this time, groundWork’s objections were dismissed. If construction does go ahead, the two power plants will join two other power stations under construction in adding 90-million tonnes of carbon equivalent emissions to the atmosphere. The other two, Eskom-owned Medupi and Kusile, will be the world’s largest dry-cooled, coal-fired, power stations in the world. Each will have a capacity of 4 800-megawatts.

Government says emissions from the new plants will be reduced because of their newer technology. Their overall impact will also be reduced as Eskom’s older fleet of coal-fired plants starts to retire in the 2020s and 2030s. But the environment impact assessments of the plants does not include their wider footprint, specifically in terms of the coal mines that will be built to supply them.

Critically, serious concerns have been raised about the impact these stations will have on water availability in the already water scarce areas where they are being built. Eskom uses 2% of South Africa’s water and is the only entity guaranteed supply, regardless of circumstances.

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Medupi and Kusile have meant the construction of water transfer schemes to bring them water. This water comes from the Vaal river system, which means it falls hundreds of kilometres away in Lesotho and the KwaZulu-Natal province. In the case of Medupi, the Mokolo Crocodile Water Augmentation Project will take water from Gauteng, at an initial cost of R11-billion for construction.

But water is scarce in Gauteng. Official climate projections – contained in South Africa’s national climate change response strategy – show that drought will become more prevalent and more severe. Projections from the 2030 Water Resources Group show that demand for the whole country will exceed supply by 17%, a situation that will be ever-more acute in Gauteng.

Medupi’s demands will also dramatically increase when it installs flue-gas desulphurisation technology. This technology decreases sulphur emissions, but triples the plant’s water use. Farming rights in the area have been bought up to access the water rights that come with the farms, in order to supply Medupi’s demand.

Concerns over this impact on water resources were so great that the World Bank investigated it when granting a loan to help Medupi’s construction. This noted that “potential project-induced harm” included “significant water consumption raising issues of both scarcity and pollution in the local area”.

The bank went on to note that “due consideration should have been given to probable future projects in the area, e.g. additional mines and coal-fired power stations”.

That reality has come to pass, thanks to environmental authorisation for more coal-fired power stations being granted.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

The post South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Renewable costs have fallen dramatically over a series of auctions in the past five years, challenging coal utilities’ dominance of the market.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research analysed government and industry data from recent procurement rounds.

It showed wind and solar PV prices dropping to 0.62 Rand/kWh (US$0.044) in 2015. Coal came in at R1.03/kWh from independent suppliers and R1.05-1.16/kWh from state utility Eskom – not counting a proposed carbon tax.

CSIR analysis of power generation cost data

Report: South Africa targets 2025 emissions peak in UN climate plan

South Africa’s coal-heavy power mix puts it among the 20 highest emitting countries in the world, with energy demand only growing.

It relies on the polluting fuel for nearly 90% of electricity, has another 8.7GW under construction and 5.8GW in the pre-build pipeline, according to Coal Swarm.

In its contribution to the Paris climate deal, South Africa pledged to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

Harald Winkler, director of energy research at the University of Cape Town, told Climate Home the pre-construction coal projects were incompatible with that commitment.

The government’s preferred alternative is nuclear, with plans for a 9.6GW fleet by 2030, but critics say it is too expensive. A lack of transparency has fuelled suspicions – officially denied – that Russia has already won the contract.

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While data on nuclear costs is scarce, Winkler said 94% of his department’s energy model runs showed atomic power would raise prices. “We think that is pretty compelling evidence that nuclear is not the least cost solution,” he said.

“You are building so much in one go and basically indebting the country. That doesn’t seem wise.”

A renewables-only scenario is possible, but depends on concentrated solar power getting cheaper, his analysis shows. CSP provides flexible power that can back up intermittent wind and solar PV generation.

The government is preparing a review of its electricity strategy, the Daily Maverick reports, but publication has been repeatedly delayed.

The post Wind, solar costs undercut new coal plants in South Africa appeared first on Climate Home News.

They haven’t and a third year of drought beckons. That puts 700,000 people in danger of starvation by early 2017.

Water, netball and basketball are the three pillars of evening life in Katse village, Lesotho. The basketball happens on a floodlit court, made for the contractors that built the nearby Katse Dam.

The netball doesn’t have the luxury of a formal court, and takes place on a field that has been flattened by running feet. It ends when the sun sets.

Some 40 women take part, either in playing or resolving disputes from the sidelines. During one argument over whether someone ran too far with the faded white ball, one admits: “We don’t really play by international rules.”

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The noise of both sports echoes across the village, mixing in with the sound of cattle bells and general discussion. It then bounces off the 2,400m tall mountains that form the community’s southern boundary.

The dam creates the other boundary, thanks to the 140m sheer drop down to its surface. That leaves a two kilometre strip of rocky ground for farming and homes.

The former take up the majority of land. Around 75% of the local population relies on rain-fed agriculture. The grey strips of fields stretch across any possible surface, giving the Mountain Kingdom a feeling of being full.

That means Katse village is squished into a small area along the spine of one of the ridges that rises into the mountains. The ground is too rocky for crops, and frost means vegetable gardens cannot use the space.

Located in central Lesotho, the Katse dam was built in 1996 (Pic: Google)

With night settling in, the ball players join the rest of the community in queuing for water next to the village’s one working tap. Its reservoir was built too low down to get water to the forever-dry taps higher up. Most homes are higher than the tap.

Dozens of white, green and yellow water containers reserve spots in the queue. Most are carried by children, who can barely lift the containers above the ground. These therefore knock against the uneven paths and spill, leaving trails on the wet ground.

A fortunate few strap containers onto donkeys, or push wheelbarrows. Three battered bakkies take water to homes more than a kilometre from the tap.

“They promised when they built the dam that we would get water all over the village.” Nchai Sitsane wears a baseball cap, more to match his American-style getup than for any practical reason – the sun has now set. He doesn’t make a concession to the biting wind, leaving his leather jacket unbuttoned. “But our parents didn’t follow up and make sure that happened, so here we are.”

(Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

His father – a miner in South Africa – passed away, as did his mother, before water came to the village. “Life here is about survival, more than about making it.”

He stops talking to look at the dam, now a dark strip to the north. It is the result of a 1986 agreement between Lesotho and South Africa.

The latter needed to solve a problem: the economic hub of Gauteng needed water and getting it uphill from KwaZulu-Natal would use up too much electricity (and money). Lesotho had lots of water, thanks to its 3 800m mountain peaks and winter snow melt, but no dams.

The 185m tall Katse Dam wall, which curves across a valley where two rivers meet, was the result.

Africa files: the best reporting on the continent’s climate crisis

Lesotho gets around R700 million a year (US$51m) from selling that water; 10% of government revenue.

The government says the money has meant new schools, roads and electricity in previously cut-off communities. Turbines in the system generate 75-megawatts of capacity, almost enough to power the whole country.

But people in Katse say they have seen little benefit from selling their water. Rain last fell in any volume in 2013. The worst drought in living memory has ensued, wiping out two season’s worth of crops.

People in Katse village doing daily tasks – cooking in the evening (Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

That streak looks set to continue. El Niño – which drove the drought in the southern hemisphere – has faded away and Nasa predicts that its wet counterpart, La Niña, will probably not materialise and bring heavy rains to fill dams.

Rainfall projections for the region from the South African Weather Service say the usual spring rains will probably not materialise. At best, good rains will come by Christmas.

This is because the climate is changing, undoing the predictable patterns that farmers rely on. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rainfall across the country will decrease by up to 20%.

That decrease will also come with a shift in rainfall patterns; more rain will be concentrated in shorter and more violent spells. For a mountainous country this is predicted to mean a great deal of topsoil washing away. 

A taste of that reality came during 2012, when Lesotho was hit with floods. These flooded fields and saw topsoil ending up in rivers and dams.

(Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

But in Katse the fields are being ploughed anyway. Four-oxen teams pull shiny metal ploughs, guided by one man while another follows, dropping seeds into the disturbed ground.

A product of volcanic activity, this soil gives farmers here an advantage over their counterparts in Lesotho’s lowlands. But soil needs rain.

“This place should be so wet now,” says Pakalitha Mokhele. His white gumboots – a fixture on the feet of all farmers here – sink into the ground whenever he puts his weight down.

Some rain fell last week, thanks to a cold front sweeping in from the south. Those that planted early have been rewarded with green maize shoots popping out of the ground. “

That isn’t enough. We will have real problems now without the rain.” Mokhele pushes his tall stick into the ground so he can free up a hand to adjust the blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

(Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

Even in spring, the morning temperature stays in the single digits. Pointing to the scrappy cattle pulling his plough, he says: “Without the rain there will be a lot of meat in October.”

The herbivore’s rib cage protrudes from under a patchy brown hide. There is little nutrition left in the local grass.

For the cattle, water is less of a problem. A tap further down from the village’s reservoir pumps water into a cement trough. Sheep, donkeys, cattle and horses all take turns shuffling each other along so they can drink.

Their largesse makes a muddy pool around the trough, which gives off water into a sliver of a stream. This makes its way down a nearly dry watercourse, down to Katse Dam.

The Katse Dam and the Lesotho Highlands water project, which supplies water to South Africa (Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

Standing next to where one of these streams used to drop down the 140m to the dam, Terrence Moshoeshoe jabs his well-honed fishing knife into the crusty grey earth.

“They are releasing too much.” The water level, he says, was a third of a metre higher yesterday. Lesotho has to keep releasing water, helping to stave off a full-blown drought disaster in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and the Free State. Katse supplies the Vaal Dam in Gauteng.

It is down to 30%. Emergency water releases have also sent water flowing the other way, to the Eastern Cape. But the cost to the dam means it is at 52% – its lowest-ever level.

A strip of recently exposed white rock runs along the dam’s winding cliff face – like the layer of grime left after water is let out of a bathtub. The water should be 26m above the point where Moshoeshoe is standing.

“People on that side [South Africa] don’t appreciate what they are taking from us,” he says. Like others in the village, he sees the dam as a form of South African colonialism – a project put here to help that country at the expense of locals who would otherwise benefit from the rainfall. “It is our resource. Where is our benefit?”

A boy collects water at dusk which he places on his donkey to take home – there is only one tap in the entire village of Katse (Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

A new dam is being planned to supplement Katse, in the second of five phases to develop Lesotho into a full-blown water resource for the whole region. Some of this will also go to Botswana and Namibia. But this expansion has been delayed for at least two years.

An official working at the dam shakes his head when unofficially queried about the delay. “Ministers always want their money.” That’s a reference to reports that South Africa’s water minister, Nomvula Mokonyane, has delayed the project because she wants to appoint her own contractors. She denies the claims.

The delay could be disastrous for Gauteng. The province’s water projections show that demand will exceed supply by 2020 – when the dam should have been finished. This is if there isn’t another drought.

A recent World Bank report – “Lesotho water security and climate change assessment” – warned: “Delays in implementing the project could undermine water security in South Africa and limit the economic growth benefits that accrue to Lesotho.”

It also leaves the 11 000 people that will be directly and indirectly employed by the project in limbo.

(Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

With precious little industry around Katse – the only big employers are the dam and local trout farms – this sort of delay means people do not have an income.

In times of drought, an income is the only way people can get food. Some 20 villagers from here used to do the two-day hike over the mountains to Ficksburg in South Africa to go work in that country’s mining industry.

Outside jobs like this used to make up 20% of Lesotho’s GDP. But a downturn in that industry means only four men in the village still work at mines and send money home.

This means it has to rain in Lesotho’s highlands. The seeds are in the ground. Entire communities are waiting for two years of drought to come to an end.

If the country’s most valuable natural resource doesn’t start falling from the sky, the World Food Programme warns that 700 000 people will need food assistance through to April 2017. South Africa and Botswana will also run dry, as the water level at Katse Dam continues to drop.

A child runs with a water bucket from school to collect water (Pic: Delwyn Verasamy)

The rest of southern Africa is facing the same problems as Lesotho, except its neighbouring countries don’t have as much water. Average rainfall in the semi-arid region is, at best, half the world average of nearly 1,000mm a year.

Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and the rest of the region has declared a drought disaster. The World Food Organisation estimates that 10 million people will need emergency food aid in the region. This is if it rains and maize crops grow in time for the early 2017 harvest.

Climate change projections – collated in the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report – paint a picture where more of the same can be expected.

The region will get up to six degrees hotter by the end of this century. That will dramatically alter rainfall, with less falling, but in more violent storms.

The report warned: “Africa as a whole is one of the most vulnerable continents due to its high exposure and low adaptive capacity.” Critically, maize yields in the region are projected to drop by a third by 2050.

This will make Lesotho’s precious water all the more valuable.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)     

The post High and dry: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched appeared first on Climate Home News.

The past year has proven a boon for the cause: as world fuel prices fell to historic lows, many national policy-makers seized the opportunity to reduce their subsidies.

Yet the real challenge remains: How to ensure these policies “stick” if and when fuel prices rebound?

History has shown that fossil fuel subsidy reform policies are often short-lived, as governments yield to mounting political and social opposition.

If we wish to avoid repeating this history, fossil fuel subsidies need to be seen as more than just a number on government balance sheets. Subsidy reforms that simply seek to cut government spending can be like treating a bullet wound with a Band-Aid: a short-term solution that doesn’t fix the root of the problem.

Instead, designing “sticky” fossil fuel subsidy reform policies requires that we address the failures of the energy systems that required or enabled the subsidies in the first place.

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Take the case of South Africa. Subsidies to electricity producers and consumers of have allowed its population to enjoy some of the lowest electricity prices in the world, leading to an energy-intensive economy that depends on cheap power. The subsidies support an inefficient and monopolistic electricity system that has grown reliant on artificially cheap coal.

Removing the subsidies would, in theory, correct those inefficiencies – but in the time it takes consumers, industry and the energy sector to adjust, many would struggle. Experience to date has shown that many fossil fuel subsidy reforms are repealed well before they achieve these expected benefits.

But there is an alternative: Instead of a top-down, fiscal austerity approach to fossil fuel subsidy reform, we can erode the foundations of fossil fuel subsidies from the bottom up – technically, politically and economically – by supporting the deployment of low-carbon technologies.

From a technical standpoint, the logic is simple. Every new megawatt of renewable energy capacity reduces the need for fossil-fueled power and, consequently, the subsidies it demands.

Crude politics: Reforming Nigeria’s oil sector

Less obviously but perhaps more crucially, the introduction of renewable energy technologies can be a game-changer for the political economy surrounding fossil fuel subsidy reform.

Renewable energy independent power producers are stepping up to challenge the coal-based interests that have monopolized South Africa’s electricity sector for decades – the very same interests that are fighting to keep domestic coal below international prices.

The emergence of a local low-carbon industry has also created economic opportunities for its population at a time when South Africa’s coal mining industry – and mining jobs – are in decline.

From an economic perspective, supporting renewables is now often cheaper than continuing to subsidize fossil fuel plants.

Thanks largely to South Africa’s competitive bidding scheme to procure wind and solar PV capacity, those technologies have experienced massive cost reductions since their initial introduction in 2011.

The most recent solar PV and wind bids even fell below the coal-dominated national electricity utility’s average cost of electricity supply.

Report: Africans asked to raise billions for energy access plan

Even in South Africa, a country characterized by its coal interests and cheap electricity, the emergence of renewables is shifting power structures, introducing diversity into the electricity mix, and reframing public perceptions of the energy transition – all of which help make fossil fuel subsidy removal a more feasible and permanent possibility.

South Africa is not unique. The cost of renewables is coming down across the globe.

In Mexico and Qatar, for example – two countries that also subsidize fossil fuels – solar energy prices are reaching groundbreaking lows, undercutting the economic rationale for subsidies from both a government and consumer standpoint.

Still, some countries may need help setting these dynamics in motion. International institutions wishing to support fossil fuel subsidy reform could offer financial and technical assistance to help lower barriers to renewable energy diffusion.

Such support could even be made conditional on the implementation and success of fossil fuel subsidy reforms.

Unlike traditional fossil fuel subsidy reform policies that often combined fiscal austerity with compensation schemes, support for low-carbon technologies likely entails a natural sunset clause because, while much uncertainty remains about the future price of fossil fuels, one thing is certain: renewables are only going to get cheaper.

Tyeler Matsuo is a PhD candidate in the Energy Politics Group at ETH Zürich. Tobias Schmidt is assistant professor of energy politics and head of the Energy Politics Group.

This post is part of a series written for “The Politics of Fossil Fuel Subsidies and Their Reform“, a workshop co-hosted by Lund University and the Stockholm Environment Institute at SEI in Stockholm on 16–17 June.

The post Inside South Africa’s battle between coal and renewables appeared first on Climate Home News.

Negotiators meet for one of their many intersessional climate talks in Bonn (Pic: Ministerio del Ambiente/Flickr)

By Ed King

Who controls the narrative around global climate talks?

That question was brought to the fore last week at UN negotiations in Bonn by a 134-strong bloc of developing countries, which accused the international media of a Western bias.

G77+ China represents a whole range of interests, from small islands in danger of submersion to powerful emerging economies.

As negotiations on a UN climate deal neared the Paris endgame, it wasn’t about to let wealthier players have everything their own way.

South African climate ambassador Joyce Mxakato-Diseko, lead envoy for the group, took the unusual step of writing a two-page letter to journalists.

“We hope that the international media, which is so familiar with the narrative of developed countries around climate change, understands us when we approach this issue from a different perspective,” it read.

The narrative, argued the letter, was a “simplistic” perspective that suggested the world had changed since 1992 due to huge economic gains by many developing countries.

“If the world has really changed so much, we ask why it is that after all these decades all our members remain developing countries with little or no voice in global decision-making processes and institutions.”

Looking round the journalists in Bonn, you could argue the world hasn’t changed.

Reuters, AFP, AP, Bloomberg, the FT and BBC were all well represented. Most reporters were from Europe, one was a US climate specialist, a few from Japan and a sole reporter from China’s state agency Xinhua.

There was no-one from India, South East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America or Africa, regions which can expect to bear the brunt of future impacts.

It perhaps explains why there’s often more of a perceived focus on carbon cuts (mitigation) rather than preparing for future climate impacts (adaptation) in media reports from global talks.

Mixed bag

Yet industrialised nations don’t have all the running when it comes to influence on the media at the UN climate talks.

The woeful lack of finance on offer to developing countries and the rationale behind their requests are well covered by the platforms mentioned above.

NGOs sympathetic to developing countries are among the most active on the media circuit, operating across digital platforms and organising mini protests to highlight their concerns.

Fleishman Hilliard, one of the world’s top PR agencies, runs Brazil’s communications, ensuring a conduit to its team on the ground.

China’s state-run media relentlessly pumps out its line on the talks, while India’s negotiators frequently leak inside information to national papers.

The small island developing group of countries (AOSIS) punches above its weight thanks to a tiny band of proactive press officers.

On twitter – the mixed blessing of modern reporting – you will find a strain of anger towards the US and other developed countries for a perceived lack of climate action.

Report: UN calls for ministers as talks head to Paris

And the tired old rich vs poor battle lines don’t always reflect realities outside the negotiating chamber.

As Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist argues in his latest blog, the likes of India, China and Brazil have the media clout to look after themselves.

That’s not the case for the 100 or so least developed and vulnerable countries taking part in these negotiations.

They lack a voice and many quietly despair at a narrative solely seeking to pit 1992’s rich against 1992’s poor, when what they need are promised funds to green their economies and radical global emission cuts from all major polluters.

Diseko’s letter suggests that all the G77 members are still developing countries with no influence in global institutions. That’s a bold call ignoring present and future realities.

China has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the BRICS group is growing in influence and all members of the world’s most powerful oil cartel, OPEC, sit in the G77.

Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are rated in the World Bank’s top 10 for global per capita incomes.

Life or death: G77 demands climate finance guarantee

The note was – perhaps – a clever ploy at a moment during the Bonn session of talks when the G77 group felt it was making real ground in clawing back some key demands on finance and carbon cuts.

Still, the framing seemed clumsy, offering an intriguing insight into mindsets as these negotiations hurtle towards an endgame in Paris next month.

“Somehow the reporting of climate change is caught up in last century,” says former Costa Rica climate negotiator Monica Araya, founder of the Nivela Think tank.

“The idea that we are mostly victims that need paychecks from the developed world no longer captures the psychology of our capitals and establishments.”

The post Message control: Reporting the UN climate change talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Table Mountain, South Africa. Waves peak, mountain plateaus, gulls decline. (Flickr/ MattHarvey1)

By Alex Pashley

South Africa, the continent’s leading carbon polluter, unveiled its climate plan on Friday becoming one of the last major economies to pledge before a Paris summit.

Greenhouse gas emissions were to peak from 2020-25, stay unchanged for about a decade and then fall, the communication said.

Hours later, the pledge was retracted. Government spokesman Albi Modise said minor details had to be changed, which wouldn’t alter its substance. The document would be uploaded later that day, Modise said.

Over 70 countries have now delivered national plans to the UN, which will form the backbone of a December conference tasked with striking a deal to cap warming by 2C.

South Africa followed the pledge of rapidly-growing economy Indonesia on Thursday, with India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia the last of the major polluters yet to submit.

Paris tracker: Who has pledged what for 2015 UN climate pact?

In the document, the country’s plan to “peak, plateau and decline” emissions bucked convention in declining to specify a reduction in percentage terms.

Instead, it said carbon emissions would be in a range of 398 and 614 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over the period 2025-30.

#SouthAfrica announces its #climate action plan prior to #COP21:emissions to peak before 2025 http://t.co/2SQbEW8TKS pic.twitter.com/5fPYeEloap

— Sébastien Duyck (@duycks) September 25, 2015

Bill Hare of the Climate Action Tracker said, on first glance, the country’s intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) in UN jargon, was very similar to its last draft.

Report: South Africa to target 34% carbon cuts by 2025, says draft

That put the level of ambition on the “borderline of medium and inadequate,” said Hare, who collaborates on the consortium of research institutes.

“There’s quite a large range for emissions. It’s not clear how much it needs to be funded internationally. There’s improved information, but some definitely some gaps,” Hare told Climate Home.

Emerging concerns

One-fifth of the BRICS grouping and current head of the developing world G77+China negotiating bloc, South Africa accounts for more than 1% of global emissions.

“South Africa faces the challenge of climate change as a developing country, with overriding priorities to eliminate poverty and eradicate inequality,” the document read.

The INDC laid out plans in five-year intervals and budgeted how much carbon can be emitted. That differed with former documents committing to cut emissions below “business as usual”.

“The offer can be considered a fair share of effort although we would want to encourage as always that South Africa aims to achieve the low end of its peak, plateau and decline range,” said Tasneem Essop, a former South African government minister who leads WWF at UN talks.

New energy

A large coal producer with 10 plants under construction according to Coal Swarm, the country is vying to stamp out blackouts that threaten economic growth.

Though it backed clean energy, having approved 79 renewable energy projects with 5,243 megawatts of installed capacity.

Officials are considering another 6,300MW, the INDC said.

Essop welcomed support for renewable power, like wind and solar, but urged the government not to divert cash to coal-based generation, or into emerging plans for nuclear.

Climate change could spell more extreme weather, like droughts in the country. A world average temperature increase of 2C could mean 4C for South Africa’s territory which varies from scrubland to desert.

Adaptation costs could run from $0.4 billion to as high as $30.8bn where countries are slow to rein in climate change.

Updated at 16:31 BST to show retracted climate pledge, spokesman comments

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A disused coal-fired plant in Soweto, Johannesburg in 2011. Coal power makes up the country’s energy needs (Flickr/ Tracy Hunter)

By Alex Pashley

South Africa’s pitch to curb carbon emissions cuts polluting industries too much slack, according to WWF.

For its contribution to a UN global warming agreement this year, the emerging economy is set to stick with goals laid out in 2010.

A government discussion paper published this month reaffirmed the commitment to cut greenhouse gases by 42% by 2025 below a business-as-usual scenario. Emissions will level out around 2030 and fall from 2036, it said.

But WWF accused the government of manipulating the figures to actually weaken the level of ambition.

Louise Naude, climate expert at the NGO, voiced concern the baseline could be “conveniently recalculated, allowing big emitters and other special interest groups to avoid their obligations”.

South Africa draft climate pledge

One-fifth of the BRICS grouping and current head of the developing world G77 negotiating bloc, South Africa accounts for more than 1% of global emissions.

As the country tries to reconcile climate objectives with poverty reduction, its energy sector’s reliance on coal puts up obstacles.

“Zero poverty is over-riding and crucial priority for South Africa, even as we need a world that moves to net-zero GHG emissions,” says the draft pledge.

“South Africa is putting in place a mitigation system, to realise the opportunities of a low-carbon economy while being mindful that a just transition requires time and careful development.”

Paris tracker: Who has pledged what for a UN deal?

In 2010, the proposed target would have seen emissions total 17.8 billion tonnes over forty years, WWF said. Since then, the upper limit had risen to 23Gt.

Having already veered off its low carbon path, South Africa needed to cut emissions “faster and more sharply, not keep giving ourselves more slack,” Naude said in a statement.

“We are seeing strong pushback from special interests, such as the fossil fuel industry and some businesses which will come under pressure in a low-carbon regime – and those in government who do not yet grasp that a shift to a lower carbon economy is the developmental path to pursue.”

The government had used confusing methodologies and data to present its emissions reduction as its fair share in a global deal, she added.

In June, before the latest draft was published, analysts at the Climate Action Tracker said the planned cuts could not be viewed as ambitious. They warned that without new policies, emissions could soar 82% on 1990 levels by 2025.

“The CAT projection for South Africa’s emissions under current policies has an increasing trend, with emissions in 2020 and 2025 expected to increase by 110% and 141%, respectively, from 1990 levels,” they wrote.

Room for manoeuvre

Almost 200 nations are set to strike a global warming agreement at a Paris summit in December. All are expected to file an “intended nationally determined contribution” (INDC) by October.

Weak INDCs from developed countries such as Australia, Canada and Japan made it understandable that South Africa wants to leave itself “a lot of negotiating flexibility”, said WWF’s top climate official Tasneem Essop.

“But to maintain their standing as a global leader in the climate change negotiations, and as co-chair of the G77+China, South Africa needs to table a stronger climate plan, given its position as an emerging economy which is among the world’s top 20 emitters.”

South Africa faces costs of up to US$30 billion a year next decade, the government estimates, as climate change raises the threat of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods.

The draft plan notes it has attracted investment in 5,243 megawatts of renewable energy capacity and is considering a further 6,300MW.

It is also inviting bids to build eight new nuclear plants with a capacity of 9,600MW, at an estimated cost of $100 billion.

Meanwhile, it is constructing 12 coal power plants, according to researchers at Coal Swarm.

These include a giant plant at Medupi, reputed to be the largest dry-cooled coal-fired plant in the world – built with $3 billion of World Bank funding.

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South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma (Pic: Flickr/SA Presidency)

By Ed King

South Africa’s upcoming climate plan will see it stick with greenhouse gas cutting goals for 2025 laid out by officials back in 2009, a document seen by RTCC reveals.

The two-page backgrounder, authored by deputy director of international climate change mitigation Rabelani Tshikalanke, says the country aims to cut emissions 34% below a business as usual scenario.

But it suggests that if South Africa receives support to help it invest in cleaner forms of energy this 2025 goal could be boosted to 42%.

“The action to be implemented depends on the provision of financial resources, the transfer of technology and capacity building support by developed countries,” writes Tshikalanke.

Paris tracker: Who has pledged what for a UN deal?

Preparations for the plan, known in UN jargon as an intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) are “far advanced” he adds, with submission due by the end of September.

It will explain how the country’s economy is on course for an emissions peak and plateau by 2030, with a decline expected from 2035 onwards.

According to the World Resources Institute, South Africa accounts for 1.07% of global emissions, a level government officials said was “significant” in a 2012 climate white paper.

“[Our] emissions profile differs substantially from other countries at similar stages, due to our large mining sector and coal intensive energy sector,” the paper adds.

The INDC will also elaborate on how the country plans to adapt to future weather extremes, and offer more details on how the government will use carbon markets and carbon pricing to meet its goals.

Mixed reviews

Analysts at the Climate Action Tracker say the planned 34-42% cuts cannot be viewed as ambitious, warning that without new policies emissions could soar 82% on 1990 levels by 2025.

“The CAT projection for South Africa’s emissions under current policies has an increasing trend, with emissions in 2020 and 2025 expected to increase by 110% and 141%, respectively, from 1990 levels,” they write.

Renewables are seeing growth – energy minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson says 4,322 megawatts of capacity have been added in the past four years, with more in the pipeline.

Still, with regular blackouts threatening economic growth, the government’s main response seems to be more investments in coal, capitalising on its huge domestic resources.

12 coal power plants are under construction according to researchers at Coal Swarm, including a giant plant at Medupi, reputed to be the largest dry-cooled coal-fired plant in the world – built with $3 billion of World Bank funding.

Bids are also being welcomed for a contract to build eight new nuclear plants with a capacity of 9,600MW, with an estimated cost of $100 billion.

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Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa launched the New Development Bank in Brazil in 2014 (Pic: GovernmentZA/Flickr)

By Alex Pashley

A new development bank to be signed off by emerging economies this week should make its first ever investment in the clean energy sector, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has said.

Members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will “operationalise” the $50 billion fund – a counterweight to Western lending institutions – in the Ural city of Ufa, they said on Thursday.

I would like to see the first major project funded by the New Development Bank to be in the area of clean energy: PM @narendramodi

— PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 9, 2015

The Shanghai-based bank dwarfs the UN signature Green Climate Fund, worth just $10 billion so far. It could award funds to its first projects by next April, its president said before the summit.

Green dreams: judging the BRICS bank climate ambitions

Modi’s remarks could reassure those concerned about its lack of stipulations on carbon-intensive investments, such as coal-fired power plants, which generate cheap energy in developing countries.

Though the eventual share of the fund dedicated to green projects, such as solar farms or drought-resistant crops for example, is unclear.

At the BRICS summit opening, 730 miles southeast of Moscow, Modi called climate change “one of our foremost challenges” with “major decisions” to be taken this year at annual UN talks in Paris in December.

The BRICS have skills and resources to make renewables and energy efficiency technology “affordable and accessible for all”, he said.

Modi’s Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, said climate change and international development were “top priorities” in 2015.

Each member state has put up $10 billion to the fund and they have pooled $100 billion to create a contingency currency reserve.

Report: BRICS group to expand environmental protection

The BRICS make up 20% of the world’s GDP, almost equal to the United States, and are home to 3 billion people.

Collectively, the five countries were responsible for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, with China accounting for 22%. That makes them key actors in an international climate agreement.

Report: China plans to double global capacity of wind, solar 

Energy use in emerging economies is expected to soar by 2030. In India, more than 300 million people live without regular access to electricity.

Strong growth in China and India in solar energy could see them take a lead on renewables.

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The BASIC group of India, China, South Africa and Brazil are keen there is still “differentiation” between the two annexes

By Ed King

Four of the world’s top emerging economies have released a 21-point statement outlining how they see a global climate change pact working.

The BASIC group of countries is comprised of India, China, Brazil and South Africa, and usually meets once or twice a year to determine negotiating strategies at UN talks.

Ministers – who met in New York this weekend – say the current set of talks on a deal – set to be signed off in Paris later this year – need to be accelerated, and welcome the prospect of a new “streamlined and concise document” outlining various options for agreement.

Any final deal will need to “fully reflect differentiated responsibilities and distinct development stages of developed and developing countries” says their statement, while stressing the need for richer countries to lead.

The group expresses its “disappointment” at the lack of finance flowing from developed to developing countries, urging those who should contribute more to “honour their obligations.”

Ministers also indicate that national pledges relating to greenhouse gas cuts and plans to cope with future climate extremes are “at an advanced stage”. The UN has called for all countries to submit these by October 1 this year.

Read the full version below.

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Leaders at the 2014 Brics summit in Brazil celebrate plans for a joint investment bank (Pic: GovernmentZA/Flickr)

By Ed King

Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa plan to deepen ties on environmental protection and waste management, according to a summary of their recent meeting.

The BRICS group also discussed plans to increase their renewable energy use at a gathering in Moscow on Wednesday.

“The group will study the possibility of creating a joint BRICS platform for exchanging best practices and environmentally clean technology and know-how,” ministers said in a statement.

It’s the first time the heads of environment from the five emerging economies have met under the BRICS banner, described by India environment minister Prakash Javadekar as a “major initiative”.

“Technology development, technology transfer and finance are important for developing world in taking more robust actions,” he said, in quotes reported by the Economic Times.

“The cooperation of the developed world is needed in this respect as the cumulative efforts of the world and our joint actions will impact the climate in a positive way.”

He added: “Prime minister Narendra Modi is confident that India will lead by example in its effort to combat climate change as Indian lifestyle is simple, stresses on need-based consumption and uses less energy.”

Green dreams: judging the BRICS bank climate ambitions 

Collectively, the five countries were responsible for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, with China accounting for 22%.

Energy use in emerging economies is expected to soar by 2030. In India, an estimated 300 million people still live without regular access to electricity.

Research last month from the UN Environment Programme indicated developing countries are close to taking the lead in clean energy investments, with the solar sectors in China and India enjoying sound growth.

Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, told delegates he hoped the new BRICs development bank could drive investments in green infrastructure.

“If brought to scale, the US $300+ trillion global financial system could help close the widening gap in sustainable development investment,” he said.

“In a marked break with the past, developing nations are playing a leading role in this all-important reshaping, notably those with major economies and rapidly developing financial and capital markets.”

The post BRICs group to expand environmental cooperation appeared first on Climate Home News.

(Pic: Hiroo Yamagata/Flickr)

By Megan Darby

The UK is responsible for less than 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Its actions to cut emissions, however ambitious, can only have a limited impact on the path of climate change.

But a tool developed by the UK government is helping to inspire and inform low carbon policies in some 20 countries and regions, multiplying that impact.

China, India and Vietnam are among the countries using a UK-led emissions calculator to design green growth strategies.

Ed Davey, the energy and climate change secretary, said: “We are working hard to demonstrate to the global family that climate action benefits people.”

Analysis: 7 emissions pathways for the world

He was speaking to mark the launch of a Global Calculator on Wednesday, an interactive tool to show the impact of various policy and lifestyle choices across the world have on the climate.

It brings together publicly available data on the costs and impacts of different ways of using technology and land into a single interface.

As negotiators work towards a global climate deal in Paris this December, it gives a flavour of the scale of change needed to meet the overarching goal of limiting temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels.

“It does fill a real gap,” said Jeremy Woods, a bioenergy expert at Imperial College London who helped develop the tool. “In the end what you want to know in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is: what is happening at a global scale?”

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change joint funded the project with Climate-KIC, a European climate innovation initiative.

And the model shows “just how important innovation is across all the sectors,” said Wood, with no “silver bullet”.

It was developed in collaboration with more than 150 experts around the world, with workshops to test the model held in Beijing and New Delhi.

“We invited the experts along and said: ‘Please tear this apart and tell us what you think’,” said Woods.

National level

The Global Calculator is the highest-level version of a modelling programme that has been going on for five years.

While that sets out the big picture, it is national models that can directly shape policies and investment strategies.

In many cases, these provide a starting point for the draft emissions targets countries are set to publish in the next few months. These in turn will form the basis of a Paris deal.

In 2010, the Department of Energy and Climate Change published a UK calculator, which showed options for energy supply and demand out to 2050. That was used to develop the government’s 2011 “carbon plan”.

The approach has been exported to several parts of the world, with national governments adapting it to their own priorities.

Energy imports

In India, for example, the main concern was with the cost of energy imports.

Anil Jain, advisor at the National Institution for Transforming India (formerly the Planning Commission), told RTCC: “While we are concerned about emissions, we are more alarmed by the rising dependency on oil, gas and coal.”

The Planning Commission, as it was then, started looking for a modelling tool in 2013.

“We were looking at the alarming import bill and what it does to our foreign exchange and we wanted to do some kind of modelling exercise, which might aggregate the energy scene for us,” said Jain.

After considering bids from other sources, including US and Indian academics, the commission opted for the UK approach.

Its analysts are working on a second version that is due out in about a month, which will have more on the costs.

Jain said: “The real value which the tool would have is the information it will provide as to what kind of investments India would have to make.”

That is critical to what India can offer in its contribution to a global deal, although Jain stressed it would not be enough on its own.

Climate diplomacy

Vietnam launched its national calculator this week and is rolling it out to 63 provincial governments.

Hoang Van Tam, an official at the Ministry of Industry and Trade, told RTCC the tool was “very useful” for exploring options and formulating action plans.

The country is aiming to cut the emissions intensity of its economy 10-20% on 2010 levels by 2020.

China is also using a version of the calculator to develop its economic and energy plan, while South Africa is putting theirs on the curriculum for schools.

Woods observed that the UK has “always had a really interesting role” and been a “key interlocutor” in climate diplomacy.

“What the UK does empirically is almost irrelevant to global climate change,” he said. “If the UK wants a level playing field, which I think is absolutely critical… the UK needs to find ways to explain how important that is.”

Jain noted that the UK had an interest in making sure it was not acting alone.

“All the carbon reduction measures we adopt would come a cropper if others did not adopt carbon emissions mitigation measures, which is probably the agenda,” he said. “That is fine with us.”

The post China and India adopt UK tool to map green futures appeared first on Climate Home News.

BASIC group officials with UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon at the 2013 Warsaw climate summit (Pic: UN Photos)

By Ed King

India, China, Brazil and South Africa say rich countries must find just under US$8 billion by November to boost the coffers of the UN’s green fund.

In a statement ministers issued after a two-day meeting in Sun City, South Africa, ministers from the BASIC group said there was “momentum” behind progress towards a climate deal, but more money was needed.

So far US$2.3 billion has been pledged towards the Green Climate Fund, well short of the $10bn its director says it needs to start operations in 2015.

“They stressed the need for clearer indications from developed countries on meeting their commitment to provide US$100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020, and meaningful and substantial contributions to the Green Climate Fund,” the statement said.

Any commitments from developing countries towards a proposed 2015 UN climate deal needed to be linked to “the scale of finance, technology and capacity-building support required by them for implementation”.

Filling the UN’s GCF is seen as a critical step towards the development of a global emissions reduction agreement, scheduled to be signed off in Paris next December.

(Pic: Oxfam)

Poorer countries say they need financial help to ditch fossil fuels and invest in low carbon infrastructure.

France and Germany have each offered $1 billion to the GCF, with smaller amounts pledges by Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, South Korea and Mexico.

On Friday Peru’s foreign minister Gonzalo Gutierrez said US secretary of state John Kerry had hinted Washington would also contribute.

“He (Kerry) says that the U.S. is considering seriously to make a significant announcement even before the Lima conference, probably next month,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

According to Oxfam the US should offer an initial US$4.8 bn to the GCF, based on the size of its economy and historical carbon emissions.

“We fully expect the Obama administration to make a meaningful pledge and protect America’s role as a leader in the effort to fight climate change,” said Heather Coleman, Climate Change program manager for Oxfam America.

UK secretary of state Ed Davey told RTCC London was also preparing a contribution and would release more details after a GCF board meeting in Barbados next week.

ANALYSIS: What did New York summit deliver on climate finance?

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