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Climate Action Group Call to Climate Action Statement 2025
Background
We are from organisations of people living on the fencelines of fossil fuel industries, in the path of proposed extractive and carbon intensive projects, and on the front lines of climate impacts. We experience the impacts of mining and burning coal, of making petroleum fuels and chemicals from oil and coal, and of extracting and processing gas. We feel it in our bodies and we see it in the ruin of our environments.
From Limpopo to KwaZulu Natal, from the Highveld to the Karoo, we experience ever more intense climate impacts driven by emissions from the industries that pollute us. We have experienced floods, blizzards, droughts, heat waves and tornadoes. We have seen people and settlements washed away, infrastructure broken, crops destroyed and families going hungry, We see people losing their livelihoods. We see increased mental distress, illness, disease and death.
We are concerned that global average temperatures have exceeded 1.5 degrees going on two years. Two degrees will likely be exceeded in the next decade. These are the targets agreed in Paris in 2015. We are angry that the world’s governments have done little to meet these targets but appear more concerned to protect corporate profits and markets.
Government has taken up our cry for a just transition. But instead of working towards the closure of coal mines and oil and gas infrastructure, it is permitting new mines and promoting the expansion of oil and gas.
Nor is it prepared for climate change. Its response to disasters has been slow, inadequate and poorly communicated. The infrastructure is poorly maintained and not upgraded to cope with extreme weather. The climate change response of municipalities is not evident in adaptation measures on the ground, such as floodplain mapping, awareness, and disaster management. Settlement planning still designs for the climate of the past, not the changed climate that we now live in. And in the most unequal economy in the world, the land market drives poor people to live in the path of danger. All this contributes to climate-related loss and damage experienced by communities.
The Climate Change Act has been very long in the making. We welcome that it has finally been signed into law. To advance the work of implementing it, and in particular of adapting to climate change, we have made many attempts to participate in governance at municipal, provincial and national levels. Open and participatory democracy is needed to realise the goals of the Act, as well as valuing people and indigenous knowledge that are steeped in resilience and adaptation.
Call to Action
We call on International governments to:
● Put the wellbeing of people and the earth before corporate profit.
● Comply with environmental laws and international treaties
● Provide climate finance from global north to global south that is public, adequate, new, additional, predictable, without conditionalities and that does not create more debt.
● Commit to a just transition with a rapid phase out of fossil fuels.
We call on the South African government to:
● Implement climate change policies and legislation
● Improve the quality and speed of government’s response to climate change disasters
● Provide adequate funds to compensate people for loss and damage caused by extreme weather events, starting with the victims of the 2022 floods
● Provide housing which meets people’s needs for stable livelihoods and creates a safe and healthy environment for them and their children
● Allocate resources for adaptation with urgency
● Allocate resources to realise a rapid and just transition for all.
● Review the education and skills development systems to include strategic responses aligned with climate change
● Develop and implement a comprehensive disaster management strategy
● Transform the health system to provide equal care for all, to address the health impacts of the fossil fuel economy and of climate change, to adapt to climate change and to xx promote a just transition
We call on the Climate Justice movement to:
● Focus on uniting a world divided and in conflict
● Advocate for progress in climate related matters
● Defend our human rights defenders
● Monitor and report on environmental degradation
● Build solidarity within broader justice movements
We call on ourselves as the Climate Action Group members to:
● Change our way of living to be more environmentally conscious
● Promote and share climate-resilient adaptation techniques, mobilising on and sharing the knowledge and abilities of our communities.
