GCIS
President Cyril Ramaphosa was one of 40 world leaders participating in US President Joe Biden s Summit on Climate Change.
SA - which tops all other G20 countries in terms of reliance on coal for electricity - is pursuing a just transition to a low-carbon economy.
Ramaphosa reaffirmed commitments to build renewable energy generating capacity of over 17 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030.
South Africa s carbon emissions will start declining from 2025, 10 years earlier than previously expected, President Cyril Ramaphosa has said.
The president was one of 40 world leaders who participated in US President Joe Biden s Summit on Climate Change. The virtual summit is to run over two days this week, and coincides with Earth Day, 22 April.
Footage taken by UNICEF on 24 January shows widespread flooding in the Buzi area of Mozambique after the landfall of Cyclone Eloise. (Screengrab, AFP)
A better and more mainstreamed understanding of the climate transition risk our historical growth trajectory poses to the long-term sustainability of our economy and society is needed, writes
Barbara Creecy.
The risks of climate change to building a post Covid-19 Green Economy need to be expanded as the country emerges from the challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Our Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan prioritises the need to overcome abiding constraints and provide sustainable solutions to intractable problems of poverty, inequality and unemployment.
2020 – a year we won’t forget
Few will be able to forget the day we first heard the word ‘coronavirus’ or the night we had our first family meeting with the President and he told us we’d be going into a lockdown. A National Disaster was declared, and regulations and emergency response measures were developed at lightning speed. For the past nine months, it has been hard to think of anything else.
But, with Covid-19 at the forefront of our minds some of us may have forgotten that in the first half of 2020, scientists had already begun predicting that 2020 had a 75 percent chance of being recorded as the hottest year ever measured with instruments since records began, breaking the record set in 2016. By December it was tied with 2016, the hottest year ever recorded.