503083 - City of Johannesburg Climate Change Action Plan
Following the commitment from the Executive Mayor of the City of Johannesburg to take action to tackle climate change in the city, SEF was appointed to update and finalize COJ’s Climate Change Action Plan. To achieve this, SEF had to consider similar climate change action plans from other cities of the world such as Houston, London, Melbourne, Mexico, Cape Town and New York City to determine a “world class action plan” best suited for a world class African city - Johannesburg. At this stage, City of Johannesburg is producing the Carbon footprint (total set of Green House Gas emissions) for municipal infrastructure which will serve as a baseline for planned reductions in the action plan. This Green House Gas (GHG) inventory will be based on the international emissions treaty signed at Kyoto in 1997, popularly referred to as the Kyoto protocol.
The strategy sets out to identify what Johannesburg can do to reduce emissions through the implementation of specific and achievable targets, considering policies in place; current and planned initiatives; behavioral change and technological opportunities for cleaner air production. The importance of this action plan for Johannesburg will not only be to reduce emissions for the city, but it will also be an impetus for other African cities to follow and indeed other big cities of the world.
Using available literature on the subject, SEF is looking at the threat of climate change to the City of Johannesburg and define how Johannesburg fits into the global climate change regime considering the City’s International collaboration and responsibilities to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on the above commitments, the impact of climate change on Johannesburg will be measured against local climate data, the Economy, Infrastructures, Biodiversity, Water Resources, Human health, Air quality, Waste and general quality of life in Johannesburg.
The action plan will indicate the measure of Johannesburg’s GHG emissions and will consider opportunities for reductions and specific actions to be taken by different role players to reduce these emissions. The action plan will contain emissions and projected targets for reduction from the following sources/ municipal operations: Community; municipal activities; buildings and structures; Energy supply; ground transport and waste.
SEF will assist COJ in identifying initiatives and stakeholders who will be responsible for ensuring these reduction targets are achieved within the Municipal Owned Entities (MOE). The action plan will also include monitoring and reviewing as ongoing commitments to respond to the real threat of climate change on the City of Johannesburg.
503084 - SEF provides the framework for developing the ‘Local Government Climate Change Response Policy.
At the National climate change summit organized by erstwhile DEAT on the 3 – 5 March 2009 which culminated with “a declaration” mandating, inter alia, all municipalities to meet and report on their response to climate change. Based on this mandate, SALGA organized workshops to develop a climate change discussion document. SEF was appointed to facilitate and report on the outcome of the Climate Change workshops held throughout the country at a provincial level in the form of a Local Government Climate Change Discussion Document. This document will support the formulation of the ‘Local Government Climate Change Response’ which will form an important component of the National Climate Change Response Policy, to be drafted by the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs (DWEA). The Discussion Document will be presented and discussed at the Climate Change Indaba to be held on 22-23 July 2009.
The purpose of the workshops was to monitor progress made by local governments, following the Climate Change Summit in June 2008 and the National Climate Change Summit in March 2009. The aim was to assess what climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies had been implemented, what projects were underway, and to understand the opportunities and challenges faced by Local Government in this regard. From these workshops, SEF identified potential opportunities for various classes of municipalities in response to climate change.
The provincial Climate Change workshops were held towards the end of May with the last workshop taking place on the 3rd of June 2009. Several key challenges were identified by the local governments in different provinces, such as those relating to management resources and capacity, mainstreaming climate change issues into municipal Integrated Development Plans (IDPs), lack of political championship, other social priorities, budgetary concerns, assistance with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) initiatives and a lack of the necessary baseline statistics that would enable local government to identify the most vulnerable sectors in the execution of this mandate. Possible policy direction themes identified in the Discussion Document centre around the issues of: strategic actions to be implemented, capacity development and awareness raising, financing instruments to fund climate change initiatives, addressing the imbalance between mitigation and adaptation initiatives and the need for monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to regulate climate change responses.
