South Africa First Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement.

This First Nationally Determined Contribution provides for the update and enhancement of the South Africa Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) in consistence with the principles and provisions of the Paris Agreement and the urgent need to combat climate change and its impacts, considering the challenges the country has to deal with: poverty, inequality and unemployment. This Document provides details of planned adaptation actions over the next decades and their associated costs for key areas of the economy mostly impacted by climate change: health, agriculture and forestry, human settlements, biodiversity, and water, with a focus on the extent of risk and vulnerability, and how South Africa has responded to efforts towards addressing the impacts of climate change so far. The Document outlines also the country’s contribution to the global adaptation goal and the adaptation priorities for South Africa: policy, planning, enhancing governance and implementation of programmes. The implementation of this First Nationally Determined Contribution needs to address significant development challenges, such as unemployment, economic contraction and impacts of climate change, such as increasing average temperature, droughts and extreme weather events in an economy highly dependent on coal.
Concerning sectoral responses, this Contribution focuses on the following elements and related interventions: climate change adaptation governance and legal framework; strengthening the government’s readiness to respond to climate risk as extreme rainfall, wildfires, droughts, floods and other extreme events in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication; enhancement of water security; improvement of flood protection measures; development of early warning systems for small scale farmers and fight against pests and diseases; supporting climate-smart agriculture; capacity building for the farming sector on climate change; surveillance and early warning systems for climate-induced diseases; monitoring of climate change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems; incorporating climate change risks, such as rising sea level and flooding, in urban planning and coastal settlement; funding for adaptation implementation through multilateral funding mechanisms.
Mitigation component and measures of the Contribution concern: respect of the right to a safe and healthy environment; review and update of the long-term goal of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation; public participation and engagement with local communities and indigenous peoples, in a gender-responsive manner; focus on emissions and removals from harvested wood products; the socio-economic consequences of COVID-19 and the fight agains climate change; ensuring high level of food production; support for non-fossil-fuel development and massive investment in renewable energy sources; gender integration into climate policies, including good practices to facilitate access to climate finance for grassroots women's organisations and indigenous peoples and local communities; equitable access to sustainable development; improvement of water quality; protection of vulnerable water users and improvement of irrigation techniques; improvement of land-use practices; reduction of risks for the production and exploitation of different crops, tree species, livestock, game, fisheries and agricultural commodities.