SA, and indeed the rest of the world, is entering the final straight ahead of the crucial Conference of the Parties (COP) 26 climate change negotiations scheduled to take place in Glasgow later in 2021, with July 23 marking just 100 days to go before the event. Friday last week also marked the third meeting of the Presidential Climate Commission, during which attendees were updated on SA’s climate change strategy by ministers Barbara Creecy and Gwede Mantashe, and the president.
Creecy gave feedback on her engagements in her capacity as SA environment minister at the ministerial climate change meeting hosted by the UN last week, where she called for the global goal of combined private and public sector climate finance of $100bn a year to be increased towards a goal of $750bn.
“We need to increase the adaptive ability and resilience of the global population to the adverse impacts of climate change by at least 50% by 2030, and by at least 90% by 2050. In this regard, focus would be placed on the most vulnerable people and communities in terms of food and water security; infrastructure and the built environment; and ecosystems and ecosystem services, particularly in Africa, small island developing states and least developed countries.”
That’s a huge amount of adaptive ability that needs to be implemented in a short period, and the minister is not wrong to be asking the countries that made the problem to help pay to fix it. However, there is some steep misalignment between previous climate finance commitments of developed countries and what they have actually delivered, so reaching agreement on how we jointly contribute towards averting the climate catastrophe is painfully slow. This should be of particular concern to South Africans as the impact climate change is set to have will fall most heavily on our already beleaguered rural population, and on agriculture in particular.
Mineral resources & energy minister Mantashe uses every opportunity to bemoan the threat to jobs from a transition to renewable energy, yet coal’s contribution to employment through mining, Eskom and Sasol is a paltry 140,000 jobs. SA agriculture, on the other hand, supports between 2.5-million and 4-million subsistence farmers, 210,000-270,000 smallholder farmers and anywhere between 50,000 and 70,000 commercial farmers.
Not to mention that the rest of us literally survive on their outputs. Yet the livelihoods of these farmers are not only highly vulnerable to droughts and floods, but with border carbon adjustments coming into place in 2023 across the EU, they are also subject to exclusion on account of the SA agri sector’s disproportionally high carbon footprint.
One key mechanism that can help break this deadlock is the rollout of agriculture-focused carbon offset programmes. The agri sector is unique in that changes to land-use management practices can both limit emissions and increase carbon storage and sequestration. Criticism of these kinds of carbon offsets has been largely due to a lack of confidence in driving emission reductions, stemming from a lack of rigorous and transparent protocol standards that are accepted both at home and abroad. The listing of SA’s first VM0042 “Methodology for Improved Agricultural Land Management” under the Verra Carbon Standard by Climate Neutral Group this week is set to change that.
The programme is a wide-ranging collaboration between Climate Neutral Group and the SA agri sector, designed to channel carbon offset revenue from national and international flows to farmers delivering climate resilience to agriculture through the integration of sustainable land-use management practices, with a focus on building soil carbon and reducing fertiliser application.
Central benefits of programmes like these include that they can access international finance, minimise reliance on state financing to support beneficiaries through private sector management and oversight, and are outcomes based. Better still is that all carbon tax-liable companies can access credits generated through such programmes to reduce their tax bills.
• Maguire holds a master’s degree in global change studies from Wits and has been developing green economy solutions for the private sector, NGOs and the state for more than a decade.
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