The City of Johannesburg Environment, Infrastructure and Services Department (EISD) is engaged in a four-day climate change mitigation workshop, which started from 14 May and will end on Friday, 17 May 2019, at the Joburg Zoo.
The workshop is exploring ways in which the City of Johannesburg can address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in buildings, energy, waste and waste water and transport sector.
The stakeholders have been attending the workshop from Tuesday, 14 May, and they include C40 representatives and city entities such as City Power, Johannesburg Social Housing Company (JOSHCO), Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), Housing, EISD and Development Planning.
Joburg is part of the C40 cities Climate Leadership Group, now in its 12th year of participation. The c40 connects over 90 of the world’s greatest cities that have committed to tackling climate change.
The workshop’s key message is to use the Climate Action Planning (CAP) process to scale up ambitious climate actions being implemented by various departments and municipal entities in the City for Joburg to realise the mayoral commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
The key objective of the workshop it is to identify opportunities to accelerate the implementation of ambitious climate actions. A modeling tool was used to guide the discussion on climate action development and emissions target reduction. Other objectives include understanding the context of the departments and entities and sharing greening/low carbon concepts, outlining projects to reduce impact of climate change, accelerating low carbon development in the energy sector, waste minimisation, recycling and composting, water use efficiency and drought management strategies and water supply efficiency.
Evidence of erratic weather patterns indicate that global change is an inevitable part of our present history. With climate change, hazards such as flooding, droughts and extreme heat are expected to increase in frequency and magnitude. The long-term climate projections as captured in the recent Gauteng province climate strategy states that increasing temperatures may be 2-3oC higher than the recent past between 2040 and 2060, resulting in increased frequency and duration of hot spells in summer.
