Low-cost, high-impact interventions such as painting rooftops white and planting more greenery could do more to shield South Africans from climate shocks than expensive emissions targets, political scientist Dr Bjorn Lomborg said.
Speaking to Business Day during a visit to Joburg, Lomborg, who heads the Copenhagen Consensus think-tank in Denmark, warned against copying the mistakes of wealthier countries.
“Germany is that great example of what not to do,” he said, adding that though the country appears to be a leader in green energy and practices, “going green is typically very expensive”.
“They’ve cut their carbon emissions by making people poorer... they actually can’t afford the very, very expensive energy any more,” he said. “They've also thrown out most, or are throwing out, much of the heavy industry.”
These industries employ tens of thousands of people, meaning the green transition has carried a heavy social cost alongside the economic one.
Instead of costly transitions, Lomborg points to practical fixes that cities can implement now. Climate experts have long warned that the northern parts of the country, already no stranger to heatwaves, will face more frequent and intense episodes as the Earth warms.
“Adaptation for heat waves...[means] making cities where most people live cooler. You can do that by putting in more greenery, more water features... paint the asphalt, paint the rooftops light colours.”
“These are very cheap things. They can dramatically lower, especially heatwave temperatures, much more than any realistic climate policy can in 100 years, and it costs almost nothing.”
For Lomborg, reducing poverty is also one of the most effective forms of climate resilience. “If you’re poor, climate is a big problem,” he said. “One of the obvious policies that SA could do that we don’t think of as climate policy, but really should think of as climate policy, is pulling people out of poverty, because [if] they’re no longer poor, they’re going to be hurt much less by whatever climate throws at them.”
Lomborg argues that governments cannot afford to fund every desirable initiative and must instead focus on policies that deliver the highest return for every rand spent.
“It’s not about urgency,” he said. “Some things are very urgent, but you can’t do anything about them... We should do the cheap stuff we know how to fix first.”
He warned that while the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) are admirable, meeting all of them would cost $10-trillion to $20-trillion a year — the equivalent of up to 20% of global GDP — far more than any country could realistically afford.
SA, like most countries, is far off track to meet the SDGs by 2030, with progress slowed by weak growth, fiscal constraints and competing policy priorities.
Through his Copenhagen Consensus project, Lomborg has worked with Nobel laureates and top economists to identify interventions that offer the biggest social and economic benefits at the lowest cost.
These include childhood immunisation, maternal and newborn health, secure land rights for farmers, and digital procurement to reduce corruption. In education, he cites personalised tablet-based learning, which can triple outcomes at an annual cost of just $31 a child.
“Don’t do all the stuff that sounds good but doesn’t work. Do the stuff that actually works,” he said.
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