South Africa is party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and has to produce a plan of action before the end of the year. Steps taken so far have not been encouraging, writes Ruth Kruger Coal trucks collect their loads on the Mpumalanga Highveld, where most of South Africa’s coal is produced. Photo: Tracey Davies, CER The Department of Environmental Affairs is preparing a plan of action that will be submitted to the United Nations before its next climate change meeting in Paris in December 2015. There are high hopes for this meeting, which is expected to lead to a legally binding agreement tying all countries into climate change action. The agreement will be based on national plans of action and climate change commitments, called the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). In March the Department of Environmental Affairs gave an update on the development of South Africa’s INDCs, and announced the intention to submit these by August or September. Will the INDCs address South Africa”s climate change responsibility? David Hallowes, an independent researcher, is not hopeful: “South Africa is a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, so we have to produce INDCs. But the government is not going to offer more than they offered in the meeting in the Copenhagen agreement” – referring to commitments made during the Copenhagen summit in 2009 His expectations were confirmed at a briefing by the department to the parliamentary portfolio committee on environmental affairs on May 26 2015, which provided an update on South Africa’s national climate change response strategy. Judy Beaumont, deputy director general for climate change, stated: “South Africa is putting instruments into place to achieve a 34% and 42% reduction [of emissions] against business-as-usual by 2020 and 2025. That’s the Copenhagen pledge in terms of mitigation. It will be the focus of South Africa’s INDPs.” So it seems South Africa will not move beyond what was promised in 2009. Beyond that, however, all we can do is watch the South African landscape for clues on the shape that the INDCs will take. In March, the national air quality officer granted the vast majority of postponements sought by industry of the minimum emission standards. The standards are a new tool which should have applied with effect from April 2015, and were designed to regulate the emissions of numerous dangerous pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, hydrogen sulphide and particulate matter. These pollutants all have complex effects on the climate, as well as having clear impacts on health. In the United States, health considerations were the “main driver behind the 1972 Clean Air Act”, according to Rico Euripidou, an environmental health campaigner from the NGO groundWork. Energy production through opencast coal mining and coal-fired power stations has transformed the landscape on the Mpumalanga Highveld, and filled the atmosphere with smog. Each power station emits a toxic combination of SO2, NOx, particulate matter, and other pollutants. Photo: Melissa Fourie/CER Since the Act came into force, there has been an assessment of the costs and benefits of its application every 10 years. The first assessment showed that for every dollar spent by industry to reach compliance, there was a saving of $25 on health. Now, a few decades later, $30 are saved on health for every $1 spent on compliance by industries. South Africa”s minimum emission standards set an upper limit for the emission of various pollutants – first a limit that applies to all existing coal-fired power plants from April 1 2015, and then a stricter limit that will apply to these plants in five years’ time, from April 1 2020. It is the first time a regulation of this kind has existed in South Africa, and the standards are still far more lax than standards in several other jurisdictions. Euripidou was involved in the negotiation of these limits, and believes they represented a compromise by civil society. “It felt as though we were making a bigger compromise than industry. But we had to have a peg in the ground, and in that spirit we agreed to the limits,” he says. If the standards are properly applied and enforced, though, they can be a valuable step towards ensuring the constitutional rights of all South Africans to an environment not harmful to health or well-being, and to have the environment protected. However, according to Euripidou, that is not what is happening. “The minimum emission standards are not being respected, and not being applied the way they should be,” he says.