As COP17 approaches: Dirty Durban’s Manual for Climate Greenwashing
By Patrick Bond
This article was published more than ten years ago. The information it contains may be incomplete or out of date.
Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate greenwashers, attempting to disguise high-carbon economic policies with pleasing rhetoric, as did their predecessors.
Will Durban Mayor James Nxumalo and a new city manager, still to be named, instead get serious about the threat we face – and that major industries pose – as a result of runaway greenhouse gas emissions? We needn’t rehearse concerns about future rising sea levels, extreme storms, flooding that will overwhelm dirty Durban’s decrepit storm-water drainage system, landslides on our hilly terrain, droughts that draw new “climate refugees” from the region into a xenophobic populace, the disruption of food chains and other coming disasters.
However, what might be termed South Africa’s “mitigation denialism” remains a notable problem. Not only did planning minister Trevor Manuel announce last week that he expects the global North to pay South Africa up to $2 billion a year through the Green Climate Fund he co-chairs – when in reality it is South Africa that owes a vast climate debt to Africa given our world-leading rate of CO2/GDP/person – but Assaf seeks to persuade politicians that Durban can “entrench its reputation as SA’s leading city in terms of climate change actions”