Environmental Impact

Eco-savvy new minister favours nature-based solutions

- Sue Segar

BARBARA CREECY HAD BEEN IN office as the new Environment minister for just two weeks when she was slapped with a major court action over the government’s appalling progress in cleaning up air pollution in the Mpumalanga Highveld.

Environmental groups Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action and groundWork submitted more than 500 pages of court papers demanding that the government clean up the area’s killer air.

Represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights, the groups said the government had violated the constitutional right of the people who live and work in the Highveld Priority Area to a healthy environment, having failed to improve the dangerous air pollution levels – mainly caused by 12 of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.

Some environmental activists viewed the court action over this “inherited” issue as a wake-up call, while others dubbed it a “baptism of fire” for the new minister, appointed in May to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new, reduced Cabinet. It was, they said, partly a bid to get Creecy to take urgent action on the air pollution, but was also a test to see how Creecy would handle the complexities of coal, which is key to South Africa’s economy but also a huge source of pollution.

With climate change and environmental issues coming to the fore globally, it is significant that Creecy was chosen by Ramaphosa as Environment Minister in a department that’s now merged with Fisheries and Forestry. The Department of Environmental Affairs was renamed the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) in June 2019, incorporating the forestry and fisheries functions from the previous Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Even former mining boss Nicky Oppenheimer said recently the Environment ministry was the most important in the government… with environment “at the forefront of everybody’s mind”.