Johannesburg - The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges that South Africa will face as the climate crisis grows.
A Just Recovery report released this week calls for a people-centred recovery from the pandemic to overcome existing inequalities. "We have been informed that Minister Creecy advised a group of climate change stakeholders during a meeting on June 1 that the terms of reference for this Commission were being finalised."
"We align ourselves with international and national efforts ... to lay the foundations of a new economy that lives within the planet's natural limits and emphasises human health and the wellbeing of our life-support system.
"We appreciate that South Africa is still very much in the midst of the Covid-19 storm, imposing an enormous strain on our national, provincial and local public health resources." "In its recently issued ‘Manifesto for a healthy recovery from Covid-19’, the WHO has warned that we cannot afford repeated disasters on the scale of Covid-19, whether they are triggered by the next pandemic, or from mounting environmental damage and climate change."Government decisions in the coming months must avoid locking SA into economic development patterns that will do permanent and escalating damage to the ecological systems that sustain all human health and livelihoods.