In response to the persistent existential threats and human development challenges caused by the climate crisis, all countries in Southern Africa have become party to numerous international climate governance agreements, protocols and action plans. Currently, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (1992), United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2016) which is "a legally binding international treaty on climate change" (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 2016:1) are the principal international agreements that Southern African countries are party to. Notwithstanding their limitations, the primary prin ciple of these international conventions is the creation and maintenance of a global platform that coordinates mitigation, adaptation and resilience building guided by common but differentiated responsibility norms. These principles also underpin other international climate governance protocols such as the Montreal Protocol (1987), highly contentious Kyoto Protocol (1997) and ancillary climate govern ance treaties that include the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (1987), Convention on Biological Diversity (1994) and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015), among others. Even though these international agreements are not perfect due to their discredited neoliberal orientation and con ception of the causes, impacts and solutions to the climate crisis, their worth is in the mapping and articulation of a global climate action vision. In an attempt to actualize this global vision, Southern African countries have in their own unique ways designed, adopted, adapted and implemented numerous climate action poli cies, strategies and action plans with varying degrees of success and more fre quent outright failure. In this chapter, we unpack and analyse selected climate laws, policies, strategies and action plans of Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe with a view to understanding the extent to which they are pathways towards social and climate justice. By any measure, this overview is not an exhaus tive analysis of all climate policies, strategies and action plans of the case study countries. Rather, a selection of the most relevant for our analysis was chosen to paint a broad picture of the state of climate injustice as the climate crisis continues to unfold.
We begin our analysis in Botswana and Eswatini. In Botswana, the country’s climate agenda is primarily anchored on the National Policy on Disaster Man agement (1996), National Disaster Risk Reduction Strategy (2013), National Development Plan II (2017), National Climate Change Response Policy (2016) and the National Climate Change Strategy (2018), while in Eswatini, the National Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (2013), Swaziland National Climate Change Policy (2016), National Development Plan (2019) and National Drought Plan (2020), among others, guide the national response to the devastating impacts of the climate crisis. While these climate action policies and strategies provide a clear agenda, we argue that what matters and makes a difference in the climate response is what respective governments, non-state actors, private sector, civil so ciety and citizens do for mitigation and adaptation purposes at the local level. The local is the most important site as it is the existential space where the vulnerable, poor and marginalized are suffering procedural and distributive injustice. In that re gard, our analysis demonstrates that both the Botswana and Eswatini governments have not directly problematized nor mainstreamed climate justice into their climate action policies and programming. Consequently, their grassroots mitigation and adaptation programmes do not adequately address deep-rooted issues of vulnerability, inequity and inequality without which climate justice is not attainable.
This lack of effective and sustainable practical climate actions towards climate justice is also evident in Lesotho and Zimbabwe. Despite a phalanx of policies and strategies identifying agriculture, energy, water, forestry, infrastructure and human health as sectors that are adversely affected by climate impacts, especially in poor and vulnerable communities, there are very limited and sometimes lack of budgets for mitigation and adaptation programming. As a result, the poor and vulnerable, children, women, the disabled, youth and other social groups continue to suffer climate crisis consequences with very limited opportunity of realizing social and climate justice. The same applies to South Africa where regardless of its ambitious climate action policies and strategies, it is failing to achieve greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets enunciated in its nationally determined contributions (NDCs) due to its continued reliance on coal for its energy-industrial complex. For this reason, the veneer of South Africa pursuing emission reductions as one of the actions towards climate justice is patently unrealistic. While it has made some progress on the adaptation front, specifcally on enhancing grassroots climate resilient agriculture, biodiversity and ecosystems conservation and provision of climate services, these successes are very few and fragmented, thus limiting their overall impact in transforming the lives of the poor and vulnerable. One of the ways South Africa, and the other Southern African countries under discussion here, can potentially achieve distributive and procedural justice for the poor and vulner able is through increasing climate fnance. Without adequate climate fnancing, many adaptation and resilience activities of the poor and marginalized will remain negligible limiting their chances of enjoying basic socioeconomic rights under the ongoing climate crisis.