Thought Leader and Activate! Change Drivers went on the campaign trail to find young people doing it for themselves
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Posted inEnvironment
Cape Town has a climate and ecological emergency
But considering the language of the City of Cape Town’s climate change strategy document lacks any urgency, one wouldn’t think so
Posted inEnvironment, Equality, General, Health, Lifestyle, News/Politics, Tech
Education policy and the future of water
On Tuesday, I watched a video on the deteriorating water situation in the Arabic state of Jordan, which foregrounded to me the imperative, that countries give a central place to essential concerns such as the continued availability of water in their education programmes, from primary school through high school to universities. Unless they pay urgent […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News/Politics
Alternatives to coal-fired electricity exist but there are no alternatives for water
By Penny-Jane Cooke The last quarter of 2015 saw five out of the nine provinces — KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, the North West, including the breadbasket of the country, the Free State — declared as water disaster areas and by extension disaster areas for agriculture. Somehow, the linkages between how the intensive water use for coal-fired […]
Posted inGeneral
Where do we go from here?
When the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) recently published its most comprehensive and most drastic report on climate change to date, the president of the United States, Mr Barack Obama, called it a “call to action”. It remains to be seen if the leader of the biggest economy on the planet will live up […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, News/Politics
The terminal nature of poverty
By Gillian Schutte As academics, journalists, social commentators and activists we have a sense that we know the poor. We are outraged by poverty and inequality and advocate for equity and a life of dignity for all. We look for ways to bring the voices of the poor into the public debate and ask questions […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment
Eskom crippling our water resources
It’s a simple truth: water is fundamental to life, we can’t live without it. The problem, though, is that water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource; one South Africa is running short of. By 2030 it’s expected that our demand for water will outstrip what’s available by a staggering 17%. Already more than 98% of […]
Posted inGeneral
Beyond protecting the environment: Ensuring life support
Several recent reports on a variety of things have made me return to an important book by Thomas Princen, Treading Softly – on which I have written here before. The news items that caught my eye covered different, but related topics. Two of them focused on court cases involving big oil companies – Chevron and […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
MDG target for water met but our taps still run dry
A United Nations and World Health Organisation report released last week (South Africa’s national water week) has claimed a near victory in achieving one of the most important Millennium Development Goals: making drinking water accessible to millions of the poor. According to the report, titled Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation 2012, “over two billion […]
Posted inGeneral
Going green in 2012: 12 steps for the developing world
Many of us are thinking about the changes we want to make this year. For some, these changes will be financial; for others, physical or spiritual. But for all of us, there are important resolutions we can make to “green” our lives. Although this is often a subject focused on by industrialised nations, people in […]
Posted inLifestyle
We’ll need two planets by 2030
At the beginning of his latest book, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order, American ecological scholar Thomas Princen quotes from the Living Planet Report of 2008: “Our global [ecological] footprint now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30%. If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we […]