Incentivizing the City of Cape Town’s draft Climate Change Strategy into sustainable action.

“Sustainable is one of those words that means something in principle, but it is too often used in a context that doesn’t really mean anything”.

That’s a quote (or close enough to it as I care to remember) from one my past university professors. At the time, I remember laughing along with the rest of the class. But, looking back to twenty years ago I realize now that those words were starting to appear en vogue, even then. And now I realize he was trying to make a point. A point that things need to be defined before we can act on them.

We need to know where we are going AND how we are going to get there. One without the other is useless.

Now, the City of Cape Town has just released its draft Climate Change Strategy. It’s done a pretty good job to highlight, from a strategic perspective, most of the key issues relating to how a large metropolis should adapt to climate change. The strategy has successfully defined a vision. This vision has been related back to the MDG’s as well as the IPCC findings, a necessary and perhaps obvious step. The City has set some high targets to achieve.

The question remains though: “Are the goals achievable?”.

Perhaps more interestingly, is the question: “What do the goals mean?”.

Firstly, the City of Cape Town, along with 3 other metropolitan municipalities in South Africa and a wide range of cities worldwide, has signed up to C40’s Deadline 2050 programme which aims to put cities on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and achieve carbon neutrality and climate resilience by 2050. This is a huge target to achieve in terms of effort, alignment, and cohesion.

Secondly, what do we mean by climate neutral or ‘net zero’. Nothing can be truly carbon neutral by default. We live in a world of carbon-based life forms driven be laws of conservation of energy and thermodynamics which means that by the very nature of human existence we are leaving a carbon footprint on the planet. Of course, the devil is in the detail. But to give the City credit, the entire world probably has not defined these terms very well. As a first pass, if we are to assume that the City of Cape Town becomes at least ‘close-to-carbon-neutral’, then the outlined goals are still an immense task.

So, if we know where the City of Cape Town is going, how will it get there? Perhaps this is the most glaring omission from the draft Climate Change Strategy; “the next steps”. Admittedly the City of Cape Town has stated that this is not the action plan, and that will The Climate Change Action Plan will be” the next steps”, the make or break moment for the City. So, while we wait for that document, what are the most glaring omissions from the draft Climate Change Strategy document?

Incentives

In any new system, people are slow to adopt to new ways of doing things. Incentives then are key to pulling people in the way you want them to go. The City must also be able to control the incentives, at risk of them not gaining traction and turning into habit. And to achieve this they must be financial incentives. It is not enough to say green is the right way to go. It is not enough to say that green is better for the environment. This won’t change people behaviour to the extent required. Money is a bigger driver than anything else for most of us, even if we don’t like to admit it.

One may argue that incentives are not needed because solar and wind are cheaper, and perhaps they are (this is most certainly an argument meant for a different discussion) but most certainly they just have to be cheaper in South Africa’s world, where Eskom provides us with the most expensive electricity in the developing world. People will always say something along the lines of “why must I pay for the city to be green when everyone else in the City remains carbon based?”. This is a problem and a clear tragedy of the Cape Town’s commons, and incentives are the only way to solve this problem. They will provide a quick an easy win for people to curtail use and move to renewable. This will also alleviate some of the load from Eskom. When it comes down to it, it must be cheaper to ‘go green’. If not, sustainability will be unsustainable. It’s just that simple.

There are many of incentives that the city can apply:

• Incentives to reduce use of water, electricity.

• Incentive’s to reduce inefficient buildings

• Incentive’s to improve car / ride sharing at least to reach the work places?

• Incentives to re-use material before throwing it out, then incentives to recycle.

• Incentives for using natural and/or low Greenhouse Warming Potential (with acceptable ODP) refrigerants for the HVAC systems.

• Incentives for using non-potable water sources for e.g. irrigation, flushing toilets etc?

• Incentives to participate to demand reduction events (in exchange for reduced electricity rates) for example.

The Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) already include most of these reduction measures in their accreditation systems. However, these accreditations apply mainly to all building except households/homes, which is strange considering that probably half of the floor area of all buildings in the metro are households or homes. The CoCt should spell out a way to partner with GBCSA and other important role players, to further enhance the GBCSA offering for households, including the poor communities, and also to understand how best that the two parties can jointly develop a new ratings or improved rating system in this area.

The city can offer incentives in the form of rates rebates for all properties that are accredited to this GBCSA standard, similar to the way that EDGE criteria is used for IFC financed projects (IFC projects are on a much larger scale than individual household level, so aren’t relevant here). Additional rebates could also be attractive if financed through green financing mechanisms through commercial banks. Balwin Properties and ABSA have developed the first green home loan, which is an excellent step, but, is only available for specific Balwin developed properties. At least though, the ball has started rolling.

The Most Vulnerable

Another important omission is the development of a methodology which determines which communities will be most vulnerable, and how to be able to protect these communities from the impacts of climate change.

The key here is that in order to not forget the poor, we need a way to determine how climate change will affect them. The City of Cape Town then needs to develop a transparent methodology to determine economic impacts of climate change on the various communities, including the most poor and vulnerable, as well as an action plan to mitigate against these risks.

The financial and economic impact of climate change on both inland and coastal development is essential, particularly with regards to the impacts of sea level rise, and flooding on these communities, both inland and coastal.

Measuring the level of green

A system to measure the progress of the City of Cape Town green initiative is critical to make the strategy achievable and real. If we don’t know well we are doing relative to our goals then we will never know if we achieve them.

These measurements could take a variety of forms and would also open up the realm of technology to assist measurements and classification of all green initiatives in the metro. Also, if this information must be always be publicly available, clearly visible to all people and widespread as much as possible. Then, it would act as the "Prius effect", pushing people to behave in a more sustainable way. An excellent example of this, very close to home, is the day zero countdown timer that the City of Cape Town implemented as part of its water saving initiatives to alleviate a city facing no water.

In closing, the City of Cape Town’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy is a short succinct and well drafted strategy document. Perhaps it needs a redirection in terms of the areas of concern; incentives, development of a methodology to determine which communities are most susceptible to Climate change, and developing ways to measure and track the greenness of the City initiatives as they develop up to 2050 and beyond.

The City of Cape Town almost knows what it wants to achieve. The next step is the hard one, how to achieve the strategy. For that, we need to know what sustainable and ‘net zero’ actually mean, before they become a crudely used marketing tool to sell something that is not actually very sustainable. And don’t be fooled, because the devil is in the detail.