President Cyril Ramaphosa released his latest weekly newsletter on Monday morning focusing on climate change and the local government elections that took place yesterday throughout the country.
It stated: “As South Africans went to the polls yesterday to elect our local government representatives, delegates from across the world were gathering in Glasgow, Scotland for the COP 26 UN Climate Change Conference.”
“The summit is taking place at a crucial time. Nations of the world urgently need to slow down the rate of global warming and tackle the effects of climate change.”
“While the discussions taking place on the other side of the world may seem far removed from the issues that matter to voters in our local government elections, the reality is that the agreements reached at the global climate summit affect the daily lives of all our people. They affect many of the issues that featured prominently in this election: electricity, water, jobs and housing, among others.”
“The extreme weather events that we are experiencing as a result of climate change affect the health, lives and livelihoods of people in every country, including our own.”
“Adverse weather such as droughts affect our already scare water supplies, making access to water harder and causing widespread crop failure that threatens our food security. Polluted air negatively affects human health. Waterborne diseases are more easily spread when there is frequent flooding.”
As a country, we are committed to making our fair contribution to the global climate change effort, and have recently set new and more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions targets.
“While we are undertaking national efforts to achieve these targets, it is equally important that we combat climate change through local actions.”
“At local government level, we need to integrate climate change considerations into service delivery planning. This needs to be in areas such as the design of human settlements, in energy management though solar water heating for low-income households, and in the use of renewable energy in municipal water and wastewater infrastructure.”
“A number of municipalities, notably in KwaZulu-Natal, are already piloting the use of different renewable energy sources such as landfill gas to electricity, biomass, biogas and small-scale hydro power. Last month the City of Cape Town launched the pilot phase of a floating solar power plant at a wastewater treatment works.”
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