http://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/news/ngos-excited-over-climate-change-laws-1.1170269

 

New climate change legislation that will give "real teeth" to the enforcement of carbon budgets - mandatory caps on the total quantity of greenhouse gases emitted within a specified time frame - for South Africa's industrial sectors will be welcome, says conservation group WWF SA.

 

Louise Naude, the organisation's national climate change officer, said this in response to a question by Johnny de Lange, chairman of the National Assembly's water and environmental affairs portfolio committee, during public hearings on the new White Paper policy document on climate change.

De Lange said that with the gazetting of the White Paper, the government now had a formal climate change policy. It was a framework within which it could co-ordinate and manage all issues relating to climate change.

However, he asked Naude her opinion on introducing new legislation that would be stronger than this framework, pointing out that the White Paper was silent on this issue.

Naude said her organisation was "very excited" about the sectoral carbon budgets proposed for the first time in the White Paper, and agreed that legislation would be required to make these budgets mandatory.

They understood that South Africa's greenhouse gas emissions would continue to grow because of decisions already made and because of developmental needs.

However, they believed that the "peak, plateau and decline" emissions trajectory proposed in the White Paper - reaching an upper limit of 614 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a standard measure for a greenhouse gas's warming potential) in 2025, remaining on a plateau at this level until 2036, then declining to the required level of between 428 million and 212 million tons of CO2 only by 2050 - was not ambitious enough.

Declining

"We say we really need to peak in 2025 and then start declining... The later you leave it, the harder it's going to be."

Tristen Taylor, the project co-ordinator for Earthlife Africa, said his organisation considered the White Paper to be an improvement on the earlier Green Paper draft and "quite pleasurable".

However, he argued that the White Paper's emissions trajectory was based on figures that were too high, and that greenhouse gas emissions should peak now and start declining immediately.

If the White Paper's trajectory was followed, other countries would have to make much sharper cuts in their carbon use to maintain an overall global emissions budget, which would be unfair, Taylor argued.

De Lange challenged him, asking whether he was saying that the White Paper was "lying" about the trajectory.

Taylor responded that his organisation believed the figures in the White Paper were wrong and that a mistake had been made.

"We would be enforcing greater cuts on other countries than we would be prepared to accept ourselves, and that would be unfair."

Ferrial Adam, the energy and climate change campaigner for Greenpeace Africa, said a "very big plus" for the White Paper was that it no longer referred specifically to the use of nuclear power, and that it also included specific targets to reduce South Africa's greenhouse gas emissions.

However, she queried the baseline used to calculate these targets, saying it wasn't clear how this had been derived.

Adam said the White Paper should be changed to bring South Africa in line with the Africa bloc's negotiating position for the UN climate summit that starts in Durban later this month.

This was to the effect that global warming had to be kept to less than 1.5ºC above the pre-industrialised average global temperature, rather than 2ºC above this level.