Chairperson, hon Minister Molewa, hon Deputy Minister Mabudafhasi, hon members, especially my portfolio committee, the environmental sector family, ladies and gentlemen and hon Mike Ellis, may I on behalf of the portfolio committee extend a warm welcome to all of you at this annual debate of the Budget Vote of the Department of Environmental Affairs. I rise on this occasion on behalf of the ANC and hopefully on behalf of the portfolio committee in support of this Budget Vote allocation to the department.
Hon Minister, as you and we in the portfolio committee are aware, the department is mainly a policy-formulating department on environmental matters, and is therefore comparatively small and functions well. The department's finances and financial management systems are in good health. For years now the annual financial statements have been unqualified, with problem areas being insignificant and easily dealt with.
Our meeting with the department, especially the director-general and the chief financial officer, the Auditor-General's Office and the National Treasury once again confirmed this prognosis. Therefore, except for there being a very high vacancy rate - which is urgently being attended to in various ways - there is little to be gained by debating and belabouring the obvious. The portfolio committee's comments on the Budget Vote debate are contained in the report tabled in today's ATCs.
I thought it would be more fruitful - as a person who has been involved with environmental issues for only the last few months - to tentatively venture a few comments on the concept of sustainability which, to me as a novice, seems to be at the heart of everything we are attempting to do. To me all government's economic and social policies are underpinned and anchored by the principle of sustainability. Most political parties and civil society appear of the same mind. My own party, the ANC, at its most recent conference, confirmed this, and I quote:
The ANC's vision has therefore sought to embrace a transformative environmentalism based upon the idea of sustainable development, which is built upon the interconnection of environmental, social and economic justice.
Our vision of the future includes a sustainable economy where all South Africans, including present and future generations realise their right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing.
However, it seems to me that, although we have a theoretical agreement on the centrality of sustainability in our developmental growth path, we do not, I believe, have a shared view of the progressive and developmental meaning of sustainability within government or amongst ourselves and civil society.
I share a few thoughts for engagement. I commence with a quote from the department's Executive Summary of the South Africa Environment Outlook, which starkly poses our challenges and formulates our problem statement in respect of sustainability as follows:
The environment outlook shows that South Africa has made significant progress in the area of environmental management in the past almost two decades. Laws and strategies have been developed that focus on key environmental areas such as biodiversity, air quality, protected areas, urban and rural development, waste and disaster management. Efforts to implement and enforce the policy framework have intensified.
Despite such progress, recent detailed assessments show that we are using up our natural capital, depleting our natural resources and rapidly degrading our environment. The ecological footprint per person in South Africa is higher than the global average - that is, 2,8 ha per person in South Africa compared to 2,3 ha for the rest of the world - and has increased by 2% between 1991 and 2001. In other middle- and low-income countries the average ecological footprint declined in this period.
In general, the condition of the South African environment is deteriorating. Increasing population numbers and declining air quality are harming people's health. The natural resources are being exploited in an unsustainable way, threatening the functioning of ecosystems. Water quality and the health of aquatic ecosystems are declining. Land degradation remains a serious problem. Up to 20 species of commercial and recreational marine fish are considered overexploited and some have collapsed.
At the same time, the basic needs of the current generation are not yet being adequately met, and unemployment and inequality are still extremely high. Poverty remains deeply entrenched and is on the increase in some areas. With the majority of poorer South Africans directly dependent on natural resources to survive, we can ill afford to let the environment deteriorate. Poverty reinforces people's dependence on natural resources and makes them more vulnerable to environmental threats such as polluted and poor quality water, degraded land, indoor air pollution, and the vicissitudes of climate change.
As well as providing the basic natural resources that sustain life, such as clean air, water and food, the environment is also the basis for economic activity, and it sustains our cultural and spiritual needs. Thus, a healthy environment is not only a constitutional right in South Africa, but fundamental for a vital society and a sustained economy.
As the South African Environmental Outlook shows, however, there are increasing pressures on our natural systems and our ability to deal with these pressures is weak and, therefore, most aspects of the environment have deteriorated and continue to deteriorate.
Many challenges still lie in South Africa's path to sustainable development, some of them needing urgent and dedicated attention. The message is clear. We need to act now, both individually and collectively as a nation. If we do not act decisively, we run the risk of losing the environmental services that we all depend on.
That's the end of the quote from the Environmental Outlook of our department.
In the light of this worrying picture, what is to be done about this continuing and, in many instances, deteriorating environmental outlook for South Africa? The portfolio committee has had the good fortune to engage with Prof Mark Swilling of the Sustainability Institute at the University of Stellenbosch on issues of sustainability, and he vividly sketches a picture of our rapidly depleting natural resources nationally and internationally, and the need to steer a decisive and focused, new, progressive, sustainable growth development path into the future.
I will not deal here in detail with his brilliant thesis. In my view, that is for another occasion. Suffice it to say that he provides us with two recent observations from politicians which seem to point us in the right direction, which is towards the urgent need to limit resource degradation and resource overuse in the process of achieving economic growth in order to avoid the fate of so many failed past civilisations. The first is by our own previous Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel, and I quote:
We have an opportunity over the decade ahead to shift the structure of our economy towards greater energy efficiency, and more responsible use of our natural resources and relevant resource-based knowledge and expertise. Our economic growth over the next decade and beyond cannot be built on the same principles and technologies, the same energy systems and the same transport modes, that we are familiar with today.
This is then elaborated on by the former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and I quote:
There can be little doubt that the economy of the 21st century will be low-carbon. What has become clear is that the push towards decarbonisation will be one of the major drivers of global and national economic growth over the next decade. And the economies that embrace the green revolution earliest will reap the greatest economic rewards. ... Just as the revolution in information and communication technologies provided a major motor of growth over the past 30 years, the transformation to low-carbon technologies will do so over the next. It is unsurprising, therefore, that over the past year governments across the world have made green investment a major part of their economic stimulus packages. They have recognised the vital role that spending on energy efficiency and infrastructure can have on demand and employment in the short-term, while also laying the foundations for future growth.
With this is mind, it is well worth reminding ourselves what is meant in this context when we talk of a progressive, developmental sustainability. Sustainability is the capacity of a system to endure disturbance. It is traditionally used in ecology to describe how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are typical examples of sustainable biological systems. Implicitly, sustainability for humans is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing which has environmental, economic and social dimensions.
Healthy ecosystems and environments provide vital goods and services to humans and other organisms. Sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity and many intuitive and literal definitions of the concept of sustainability have been offered with this understanding.
For example, the International Institute for Sustainable Development considers sustainability to be, and I quote:
... adopting business strategies and activities that meet the needs of the enterprise and its stakeholders today while protecting, sustaining and enhancing the human and natural resources that will be needed in the future.
For many, sustainability involves active management and enhancing of five critical assets. Firstly, there is natural capital - that is, the environment; then, secondly, human capital - that is, people; thirdly, social capital - that is, our social relations and structures; fourthly, manufactured capital - that is, our fixed assets; and fifthly, financial capital.
Sustainability is achieved by living off the income which, in this case, is an outflow or output from these capitals, rather than by degrading the capitals themselves.
It suffices to point out that moving towards sustainability is also a social challenge that entails international and national law, urban planning and transport, local and individual lifestyle changes - which are probably the most difficult changes to make - and ethical consumerism.
Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms, from reorganising living conditions, for example, ecovillages and sustainable towns and cities, to reappraising economic sectors such as green building and sustainable agriculture, or work practices using science to develop new technologies, for example, green technologies or renewable energies and so on, to adjustments in individual lifestyles that conserve natural resources.
Thus, sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems. Although sustainability can be defined in such a simple manner, it is also a call to action, a task in progress or a journey, and therefore it is a highly political process.
In essence, sustainability speaks of a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic, social and environmental justice, and a culture of peace.
Historically, there has been a close correlation between economic growth and environmental degradation, meaning that, as communities grow, so the environment declines. This trend is clearly demonstrated in graphs of human population numbers, economic growth and environmental indicators. Unsustainable economic growth has been starkly compared to the malignant growth of a cancer because it eats away at the earth's ecosystems' services, which are its life-support system.
There is concern that unless resource use is checked the modern global civilisation will follow the path of ancient civilisations that collapsed through overexploitation of their resource base. Implicitly, business cannot succeed in societies that fail, and it is with this understanding that sustainability studies analyse ways to reduce or decouple the amount of resources such as water, energy or materials needed for the production, consumption and disposal of the unit of goods or services, whether this be achieved, inter alia, by improved economic management, product design or new technology.
Sustainability examines societal metabolism ... [Interjections.] I should give this to you to read! [Laughter.] Sustainability examines societal metabolism through the throughput of resources that enter and exit the economic system in relation to environmental qualities.
The primary responsibility for co-ordination and implementation of sustainability programmes rests with governments worldwide. In fact, integrating sustainability into national development policies is one of the goals of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which South Africa is committed to implementing.
It is in this context that Cabinet passed the National Framework for Sustainable Development, NFSD, in July 2008. The NFSD is designed to, and I quote -
... initiate a broad framework for sustainable development in South Africa that can serve as a basis from which to develop and consolidate a national strategy and action plan.
The NFSD proposes a national vision, principles, trends and strategic priority areas and a set of implementation measures that are intended to enable and guide the development of a national strategy and action plan. The NFSD outlines the country's sustainable vision as follows:
South Africa aspires to be a sustainable, economically prosperous and self-reliant nation state that safeguards its democracy by meeting the fundamental human needs of its people, by managing its limited ecological resources responsibly for current and future generations, and by advancing efficient and effective integrated planning and governance through national, regional and global collaboration.
This vision is informed by the environmental, social, economic and other fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution, and the global and national priorities captured in the Millennium Development Goals, and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation ...
... that was arrived at at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, as well as, of course, government's macro socioeconomic policies.
It is a projection of the nation's aspirations to achieve a better quality of life for all now and in the future, through equitable access to resources and shared prosperity. It places the nation on a developmental trajectory which ... must move society towards greater efficiency and innovation in resource use, and the integration of social, economic, ecological and governance systems.
The government notes in the NFSD that the achievement of sustainable development is not a once-off occurrence, meaning that its objective cannot be achieved by a single action or decision. It is an ongoing process that requires a particular set of values and attitudes in which the economic, social and environmental assets that society has at its disposal are managed in a manner that sustains human wellbeing without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Furthermore, the successful implementation of the NFSD and the achievement of sustainable development objectives and targets are contingent upon the ability and willingness of all South Africans to share in this common vision. Accordingly, all sectors, including elements of the state and civil society, organised labour and business should participate in the social contract to implement the NFSD and the emergent national strategy to follow.
Economic growth often entails increased use of energy and materials in society which, in turn, gives rise to ...