Browsing by Author "Manzella, Marco John"

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    South African Climate Change Regulation: Towards Climate Change Mitigation
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022) Manzella, Marco John
    Climate change is the change in earth’s weather and climactic conditions due to an average rise in the temperature of the earth’s surface. This temperature increase has principally resulted from an exponential increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from anthropogenic activity. The consequences of climate change are experienced differently by different regions and the effects can reach across the globe ranging from minor to catastrophic proportions depending on the location of a country. The international response to this crisis has accelerated significantly since the early 1990s and the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). South Africa acknowledges the threat of climate change; however, the country has a strained relationship with climate change mitigation as one of earth’s highest emitters of GHGs per capita due to its dependency on coal combustion. This dependency is further complicated by the sector’s status as a primary employment and socio-economic driver domestically. These competing priorities impact upon South Africa’s climate change response. South Africa has advanced climate change mitigation to a limited extent through the slow development of a domestic regulatory framework. The mitigation effort is hampered by some shortfalls in the domestic regulatory framework. The country currently lacks climate change law. This paper seeks to determine how capable South Africa’s domestic framework is of facilitating climate change mitigation. It espouses the view that a robust and comprehensive regulatory framework is necessary for meaningful domestic mitigation action. It emphasizes the importance of regulatory certainty – where adoption and enforcement of the framework are concerned. The current regulatory framework – despite its fragmented, ad hoc nature – is already advancing limited mitigation action. This limited success can be amplified by the adoption of a better developed, more comprehensive framework