The Paris Agreement : Meaningless for Africa
( Civil Society)
The Paris Climate Agreement signed by representatives of over 175 nations, including South Africa, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on April 22, is meaningless for Africa, according to environmental justice organisation groundWork. This Civil Society, based in South Africa is working with community people from around South Africa, and increasingly Southern Africa. For its Director, Bobby Peek, the commitments made in Paris were too late and too weak. This means that the hope to keep the temperature increase to below 1.5 degrees has been overshot.
« The ‘fair share’ is what each country should do to keep the world within the limited and declining carbon budget; looking at how much more greenhouse gas can be put into the atmosphere before exceeding 1.5°C. The climate science is clear that breaching the 1.5 degree guardrail poses an unacceptable risk of crossing irreversible tipping points, impacting billions of people,” Groundwork organization explained ahead of the signing ceremony in New York.
But there is a positive future for climate change according to the NGO.
« At a local level to combat climate change there needs to be a just transition from fossil fuel based energy to renewable energy, which is locally owned by the people who use it. The alternative to fossil fuel based energy production is renewable energy like sun and wind power that does not rely on dirty and destructive practices of extraction and combustion, and does not pollute people’s health and environment, » Groundwork said earlier.
Listen to the interview of Bobby Peek
By Wandile Kallipa
