Climate change adaptation and the African fisheries: evidence from the UNFCCC National Communications

Climate change can cause significant (un)foreseen changes in the fisheries sector. However, adaptation has the potential to moderate some of the impacts. This paper explores the challenges faced by both freshwater and marine fisheries sector in addressing climate change and teases out intervention measures from 21 African countries. The paper uses document analysis and draws selected analysis parameters from the grounded theory. The data are obtained from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change National Communication reports. Among the key adaptation measures emerging from the analysis are: fish breeding, integrated coastal management, putting in place appropriate policies, water and flood management as well as research and development. The study concludes that adaptation in the African fisheries sector should be prioritised, an aspect that could also apply elsewhere in the world to enhance food security.     

Using ICT indicators to measure readiness of countries to implement Industry 4.0 and the SDGs

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - At the epicentre of Industry 4.0 is Information Communication and Technology (ICT) and across the 17 Sustainable Development (SDGs) are indicators...     

Green procurement in South Africa: perspectives on legislative provisions in metropolitan municipalities

This paper sets an objective to analyse legislative provisions for green procurement in South Africa’s metropolitan municipalities in the context of climate change and sustainable development. The main methods for data generation were interviews and document analysis. There were 30 interviews granted by among others, procurement officers, town planners and economic development specialists. In addition, 51 policy documents were retrieved, followed by a keyword search. The keywords were carefully selected and limited to those commonly used in green procurement terminology to include climate change, green procurement, renewable energy, energy efficiency, mitigation, clean technology, carbon footprint, sustainable development and green economy. The findings are that although all the metropolitan municipalities have procurement policies in place, only the City of Cape Town and eThekwini metropolitan have incorporated green procurement strategies into their supply chain management. The City of Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan municipalities also emerged as the only ones with stand-alone green procurement strategies. To this end, the research concludes that legislative provisions mandating green procurement in South African metropolitan municipalities are not entirely lacking, although more work needs to be done to roll this out to cover all the existing metropolitan municipalities.     

Mapping South Africaʼs nationally determined contributions to the targets of the sustainable development goals

The Paris Agreement?s nationally determined contributions (NDCs) provide an excellent point of entry to simultaneously address climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study sets out to explore the connections between climate action plans (NDCs) and each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this study, we used four levels of visibility, that is, present, generic, implied and absent to provide a broad perspective of the extent to which South Africa?s NDC is aligned with the targets of the SDGs. Our results revealed that South Africa?s NDC has 12% present level of visibility to the SDG targets, with SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy and SDG 13 Climate Action showing the highest representation of present level of visibility. By contrast, the absent level of visibility NDC showed 53% in the SDG targets, with SDG 5 Gender Equity, SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions and SDG 3 Good Health and Well‐Being, showing the highest representation of absent level of visibility. These results indicate that there is scope to improve the alignment of South Africa?s NDCs with the SDG targets. To this end, we have identified areas that may benefit with further elaboration in the country?s second NDC.     

Benchmarking the effectiveness of mitigation measures to the quality of environmental impact statements: lessons and insights from mines along the Great Dyke of Zimbabwe

The environmental impact statement (EIS) plays an important role in informing decision makers about the likely impacts of development projects on the environment and suggesting mitigation measures for addressing such impacts. Increased effort to improve the quality of EIS has been a focus on its proposed mitigation measures and their likely effectiveness. There is, however, a lack of such studies in Zimbabwe’s mining industry. Following a conceptual framework of EIS quality as an indicator of mitigation effectiveness, this paper assesses the quality of EIS and its likely influence on the effectiveness of its proposed mitigation measures. Twenty-two purposively sampled EISs for mines operating along the Great Dyke of Zimbabwe were reviewed using the modified Lee and Colley (Review of the quality of environmental statements, Manchester EIA Centre, University of Manchester, Manchester 1992) quality review package and Mitchell’s (EA the Magazine of IEA and EARA 28–29, 1997) mitigation hierarchy guidelines. Results show that 77 % of the EISs are of satisfactory quality, while 51 % of the proposed mitigation measures focus on adverse impact reduction. The deficiencies are traced to vagueness in the regulations regarding baseline data collection and analysis and conceptualization of mitigation. Based on the results, it is suggested that more efforts should be aimed at reviewing the EIA regulations in order to improve the quality of EISs.