ShowMe South Africa

Environmental impact

Article from Noseweek Magazine December 2019. By Sue Segar

Eco-savvy new minister favours nature-based solutions

Barbara Creecy had been in office as the new Environment minister for just two weeks when she was slapped with major court action over the government’s appalling progress in cleaning up air pollution in the Mpumalanga Highveld.
Againts Nuclear energy
Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action

Environmental groups Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action and groundwork submitted more than 500 pages of court papers demanding that the government clean up the area’s killer air.

Represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights, the groups said the government had violated the constitutional right of the people who live and work in the Highveld Priority Area to a healthy environment, having failed to improve the dangerous air pollution levels – mainly caused by 12 of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.

Some environmental activists viewed the court action over this “inherited” issue as a wake-up call, while others dubbed it a “baptism of fire” for the new minister, appointed in
May to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new, reduced Cabinet. It was, they said, partly a bid to get Creecy to take urgent action on the air pollution, but was also a test to see how Creecy would handle the complexities of coal, which is key to South Africa’s economy but also a huge source of pollution.

With climate change and environmental issues coming to the fore globally, it is significant that Creecy was chosen by Ramaphosa as Environment Minister in a department that’s now merged with Fisheries and Forestry. The Department of Environmental Affairs was renamed the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) in June 2019, incorporating the forestry and fisheries functions from the previous Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Even former mining boss Nicky Oppenheimer said recently the Environment ministry was the most important in the government… with the environment “at the forefront of everybody’s mind”.

Creecy, a member of both the ANC’s National Executive Committee and its National Working Committee – and one of the longest-serving members of Gauteng’s provincial legislature -has made her mark in government in various ways. As Education MEC – a position she held from 2009 – she led a turnaround strategy for the Gauteng Education Department to improve matric performance in 400 under-performing township schools. The programme was recognised by the UN and awarded first prize in the category Improving Delivery of Public Services.

Creecy’s integrity stunned observers at the Life Esidimeni hearings in Johannesburg last year when she strongly refuted claims made by former health MEC Qedani Mahlangu and others that Life Esidimeni had cash problems that caused it to shut down. She stressed that the Treasury would never have endorsed cutting down on essential social services and said the provincial health department had more than enough funds.

There was widespread speculation ahead of the cabinet appointments that Creecy, most recently employed as the respected Finance MEC in Gauteng, would become Finance minister or deputy in the new Cabinet – but she’s not complaining. Phrases like the “just transition”, the “circular economy”, “biodiversity loss” and “ecosystem degradation” slipped easily off her tongue when we met for an interview at Parliament. She spoke continually of that elusive concept “the just transition”, relating to the move to a low-carbon economy while keeping in mind the need for an inclusive economy and sustainable development.

Barbara Creecy had been in office as the new Environment minister
Coal Plant in Mpumalanga

“This is a fantastic job; a very interesting, stimulating portfolio,” Creecy said. “Now, with fisheries and forestry thrown in, it’s huge, with many different policy areas. (The work) is a big mix between economic development issues and conservation, sustainable use, climate change, waste management, and everything that creeps and crawls and flies and swims.”

When we met, Creecy had just returned from the UN Climate Action Summit in New York where, amongst others, she met Swedish teen-hero Greta Thunberg. “I asked to take a selfie with her! I was very struck by how young and vulnerable she is. She reminded me of how young some of us were when we got involved in the struggle against apartheid. Hector Petersen was ten when he was shot.

“I am a great believer that if you don’t feel strongly and passionately about things when you are young, when will you ever feel strongly and passionately about things? The children of 1976 changed South Africa, so I think these young people who are fighting the climate change struggle deserve respect for their views.”

Of the UN Climate Action Summit, Creecy said: “The big issue on everybody’s agenda now will be the question of the just transition. South Africa is a heavily coal-dependent economy, with 80% of our power coming from coal. Climate change is affecting our lives already. We have good global commitments but we haven’t done enough to domesticate those things. That will be a key area of focus.”

Commenting on the government’s recently released Integrated Resource Plan (IRP2019), she said she was “happy about the massive increase in renewables”.

Creecy sees the three big environmental issues like climate change, loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation. “These issues are everybody’s issues. They are happening right now and already impacting all our lives: the drought in the Western Cape, the ongoing drought in Northern Cape and Eastern Cape, the severe weather events in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the cyclone in Mozambique. The poor and vulnerable in our society are going to be the people most impacted by these things and have the least ability to deal with them.”

In our interview, Creecy spoke of the tightrope she has to walk in dealing with numerous issues and of the delicate balance between “keeping the lights on, on one hand, and not creating a major public health threat on the other hand”.

(In the court action over pollution of Mpumalanga Highveld, the Environment department has “presented a settlement proposal to the parties in this matter and awaits their response,” a departmental spokesman told Noseweek.)

Said Creecy: “It’s a reality that the atmosphere on the Mpumalanga Highveld is heavily polluted – and it’s a reality that we have to do something about it – but how do you walk the tightrope? That’s my challenge.

“We all know what happened when there wasn’t energy security earlier in the year, so it’s a question of how to get everybody to the table and to agree to start doing something about this, to ensure we address the problem without affecting the production of electricity.”

Creecy said she anticipated doing a lot of “this sort of tightrope walking” in her new portfolio. “There is not only one ‘just transition’ in this country, but there are also many just transitions because all decisions we take can have unintended consequences. We need to be clear from the start, what we are we trying to avoid. We have to have energy security and we can’t shed jobs.

“I am fully aware that the solutions to poverty, inequality, and unemployment lie in economic development -but in our current context they have to lie in sustainable economic development.”

In October, Creecy was widely praised by environmental groups and others when she set aside the environmental approval by the Department of Mineral Resources for a planned open-case coal mine – the Palmietkuilen coal mine – on the East Rand. She said it was crucial for commercial agriculture in the Springs/Nigel area to be safeguarded.

It had been anticipated that the proposed coal mine would have produced 2,400,000 tonnes of coal a year for nearly 50 years. But it would have been upstream of the Blesbokspruit – one of the largest wetlands in the Highlands area which feeds the Marievale Bird Sanctuary in Springs and flows into the Vaal River.

In her decision, Creecy said that, while she was aware of the social benefits of the proposed mining, “I find that such does not outweigh the need to protect and preserve the prime agricultural land”. The area had been used for agricultural purposes for generations and could go on being used for these if soil disturbances were avoided.

‘This shows we have a Minister of the Environment who is interested in the future of the country’

“One of the biggest threats to the retention of productive agricultural land is the conflict between agriculture and mining land uses. With the matter at hand, it is vital to preserving the current land use, mainly for commercial agriculture,” Creecy said.

Againts Nuclear energy
Cleaning up

Liz McDaid, the long-time environmental activist who was the joint winner, with Makoma Lekalakala, of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for using the courts to stop the South African government’s multi-billion-rand nuclear build programme, said she will be watching Creecy closely.

“I think she is a minister with good intentions. She has shown she’s competent and humble enough to acknowledge there are faults and she’s going to fix them.”

McDaid, not known for faint praise, lauded Creecy for the decision on the Palmietkuilen coal mine.

“This shows we have a Minister of the Environment who is interested in the future of the country. She’s shown us that she is prepared to stand up against the mining industry. I hope her colleagues in the cabinet will give her one hundred percent support, as those are the kinds of decisions we need when looking to the long-term wealth of the country rather than short-term greed.”

McDaid continued: “The department … has a huge responsibility for environmental management and law enforcement. Their law enforcement activity is crucial for our economy because of derelict mines, air quality, air pollution all impact on health and the environment. Somebody has to be the custodian of a good clean environment… You can’t have good sound economic development without good strong environmental regulations. The sooner South Africa realises that, the better. We cannot continue polluting and affecting the most vulnerable people. It’s just not fair.”

When we met Creecy had come from an “extremely sad” gathering of about 300 fishing people in Lambert’s Bay on the West Coast. Her trip was part of a systematic programme to visit different geographical areas where fishing folk live.

“Their families have always had a livelihood from fishing; they want to continue to make a livelihood from fishing and they can’t understand why somebody has to give them a right to do what they have always done historically. Many of them have been excluded from the process of fishing rights. In the Western Cape, there were 10,000 applications by small-fishing persons for a right in terms of the small-scale fishing policy. Only 2,000 got through the loop. Some of them failed because they needed to initial every page of the application and didn’t have lawyers to help them fill in their applications.

Barbara Creecy is sworn in as Minister of the Environment
Barbara Creecy is sworn in as Minister of the Environment

“People in that community are really poor — and dependent on this industry. The way we have been implementing policy is not helping them. The way in which we deal with these applications has to be empowering; it cannot be exclusive. The purpose of my watch will be to help people to comply, not to keep people out. It needs to be developmental, not exclusionary and pejorative.

“I have been hosting meetings with subsistence fishermen and fishing communities in the Western Cape, including the West Coast at Lambert’s Bay, the Overberg region at Hermanus, and all Cape Town Metro small fisher communities in Hout Bay. These were very difficult meetings where fisher-people spoke of the extremely hard conditions in which they live and work, their lack of access to sustainable livelihoods and their frustration that they still have not received the small scale rights they had hoped to receive in 2016.”

At the time of our interview, Creecy was also preparing for a colloquium — in November – on single-use plastics. “We are all concerned about the impact plastic is having on the environment, particularly on our oceans. Some people say by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea. We are working closely with industry in organising this colloquium.”

Creecy was also mulling over the recent Afro-barometer survey which found that more than half of South

Africans had never heard of climate change, as well as the release in October of the National Biodiversity Assessment (NBA). The five-year study found that the major pressures on South Africa’s biodiversity are habitat loss, changes to the freshwater flow, overuse of some species, pollution, climate change and invasive alien species.

“Key take-outs are that South Africa’s long history of conservation and environmental management is paying dividends: about 9% of our total landmass and sea mass are now under-protected areas and about 75% of our ecosystems are well protected.

“The NBA revealed that 36 South African plant species are already confirmed extinct, a further 70 possibly extinct and 14% of all plant species threatened with extinction. Of the 2,911 animals assessed, 12% are threatened with extinction.

“Another interesting take-out is the fact that there are about 420,000 people working in the conservation sector, which compares favourably with a big sector like mining that is about 430,000. The statistic is: for every one person involved in conservation there are five others who would be making a living out of the biodiversity economy which wouldn’t exist if we didn’t look after our biodiversity.”

Another issue that has received her attention recently is the long-outstanding issue of 3,000 tonnes of mercury waste stored in warehouses at Cato Ridge in KwaZulu-Natal.

“The Davis Commission of Inquiry in the 1990s recommended that Thor Chemicals should take responsibility for the safe disposal of the waste. This matter was not resolved. I visited the site in August. Following negotiations between our department and Thor Chemicals we hope shortly to announce how Thor Chemicals will take responsibility for the waste.”

Asked whether she believes economic development can be balanced with environmental care, she said: “In fact, environmental care/conservation has become one of the world’s key drivers of economic development. If one considers the example of the global energy revolution currently underway which is moving us from a century of fossil fuel dependence to sustainable renewable energy, one starts to understand this new and exciting relationship — called sustainable development.

“The global efforts to create a circular economy where one person’s waste becomes another person’s product or the raw material is part of this new impetus for development within our fixed planetary boundaries. Indeed, the use of the ‘development’ moniker for economic activities that do not consider environmental care/conservation is being seriously questioned.”

Asked about her prioritised goals, Creecy said these include the expansion of marine protected areas; ensuring that the government’s three Phakisa (meaning “hurry up”) programmes -Waste Phakisa, Oceans Phakisa and the Biodiversity Economy Phakisa -move from planning to implementation phases and deliver on job promises; and to deliver on Job Summit commitments in the forestry sector.

“In conservation, our goal is to open two new national parks, thereby increasing our protected land areas to 16% of our landmass: one will be in the Northern Cape around the SKA and the other in the Eastern Cape.”

Another priority, she said, is “to align the important work we are doing on Working for Water to ensure we are protecting our most important catchment areas, estuaries and wetlands. This will include removal of alien species, rehabilitation of wetlands and estuaries.

“We also plan to further drive the land-sector programme Working for Ecosystems, in rehabilitating denuded grasslands, forests and woodlands by re-establishing healthy grass cover and planting trees and shrubs to combat desertification; [we plan] to ensure more effective diversion of waste from landfills, and informal dumping into re-use and recycling; and ensure we allocate fishing rights to small fisher communities throughout the country and support them to grow sustainable businesses; ensure the FRAP 2020/21 process of fishing rights allocations in 12 fisheries is fair, accountable, transparent and promotes our economic transformation objectives.”

Other priorities include: passing the Climate Change bill and ensuring all municipalities and provinces have climate-change adaptation and mitigation targets and implementation strategies; participating in the just transition process so that we set our country on a sustainable low-emissions development trajectory.”

Asked about perks of the jobs, Creecy said that already in her short tenure she’d been to some of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. “Have you seen the extent of the kelp forests of the Western Cape? Have you seen Kosi Bay? You stand on top of that hill and look at the three lakes… I went to Langebaan the other day. We overlooked the lagoon – and then went to one of the hides and saw these amazing little waders. The scientist with us said these tiny little birds fly to Russia and back every year. When you see these places and these creatures, you say, ‘yes it is our duty to give to the next generation an endowment of at least equal value to that which we have inherited.”

Share

I Love ShowMe
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
WhatsApp
Telegram
Pinterest

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.