Opening of the Ecosystem based Adaptation (EbA) Symposium, South Africa 2021

Thank you to the Programme Director.

Good morning to:

• Honourable Barbara Creecy, the South African Minister of Forestry Fisheries and Environment,
• Honourable Zakia Khattabi, the Belgian Minister of Climate, Environment, Sustainable Development, and Green Deal
• Her Royal Highness Princess Ketumile Khaliphile Mabhena, Cultural Activist and Environmentalist
• The Directors-General of national departments,
• Representatives from the national departments,
• The United Nations Family and partners,
• Members of the development community and civil society,
• Representatives from the private sector and academia,
• Our Esteemed guests – ladies and gentlemen All Protocols Observed

I extend my gratitude to the organizers of the Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) Symposium for allowing me to present these opening remarks. This is a very significant occasion as the Symposium is being held within the backdrop of the recently launched UN Decade of Ecological Restoration.  It is also being held in a crucial year for climate action which may be our last opportunity to meet the commitments made in the Paris Agreement and save ourselves from catastrophic climate change.

This forum gives us the opportunity to reflect on and reinforce evidence‑based, informed decision-making and promote the implementation of climate change adaptation across South Africa and the continent. It will also allow all key stakeholders to reflect on cost-effective and sound ways to begin to rebalance our relationship with the natural world that we rely on.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we cannot stabilize and restore our ecosystems and their biodiversity or limit the devastating consequences of climate change, none of us or our children have a future. We are all living on borrowed time.

I encourage all participants to critically and passionately engage over the next couple of days on the ways in which we can make ecosystem‑based adaptation not just a buzz word for the day, but to make it a best and dominant practice. This approach can protect our ecosystems, increase the resilience and reduce the vulnerability of local communities. In particular, we need to focus on our brothers and sisters living in rural areas as they are more immediately dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services and are more vulnerable to the dangers posed by climate change.

Over the past few years, South Africa has experienced devastating impacts of weather-related hazards such as floods, wildfires, storms and droughts. We have seen the wildfires in the Western Cape, floods in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and periods of prolonged droughts in several areas in the country. These events have wreaked havoc on infrastructure and communities, causing devastating economic and social losses. These disasters are just a pale foreshadowing of what is to come unless, we treat climate change as the existential threat that it is.

As President Ramaphosa explained at the G7 Leaders’ Summit session on Climate and Nature last week, “The existential threat posed by climate change requires nothing less than urgent, ambitious and collective action by the nations of the world.” There is no more important task in these decades of the 21st century than reducing greenhouse gas emissions, moving away from fossil fuels and stabilizing our changing climate. Every tenth of a degree matters and all countries, including South Africa must do more.

To this effect, responding to climate change requires comprehensive, integrated strategies that simultaneously address social, economic and environmental consequences. Our efforts to redress climate change, both through adaptation and mitigation, should inform and ultimately shape the global development agenda.

Biodiversity loss is a crisis that is rapidly equaling climate change in its magnitude. As the Secretary General has said, “Humanity is waging war on nature. Deforestation, climate change and the conversion of wilderness for human food production are destroying Earth’s web of life…We are part of that fragile web… and we need it to be healthy so we and future generations may thrive.” Covid-19 is a terrifying example of our damaged relationship with the natural world. Indeed 60% of all known diseases and 75% of new infectious diseases have passed from animals to humans as a consequence of our disregard for the natural world.

In the face of mounting pressures on natural resources  and ecosystems and intersecting socio-economic crises; I am encouraged to see that South Africa has adopted a National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. The Strategy aims to build climate resilience at all levels of society, integrate adaptation responses into all sectors and plans, improve the understanding of the driving forces of climate change and ensure the resources and systems are in place to enable implementation. This well-developed strategy outlines the necessary actions to be taken but implementation has been slow and fragmented. To achieve a level of adaptation that will safeguard communities and infrastructure, we need more participation and collaboration with the private sector, academia and civil society. We cannot have a siloed approach as we face the planet’s greatest threat.

Today, I am pleased to see that representatives of the various sectors will be participating and leading many of the discussions over the next three days. Allow me to acknowledge and thank all stakeholders for their commitment to promote scientific common evidence-based, informed decision making and implementation for climate change adaptation.

Through our strong partnership with the Government of South Africa, donors, and other stakeholders in the environmental space, we want to see five key outcomes in the near future.

Firstly, we need to support and strengthen Climate Change Adaptation Capacity at the national and sub‑national level to ensure food, water and energy security. We understand that climate change will affect us all, but it will impact the poor first and hardest. We need to urgently enhance adaptation measures that protect food security and nutrition. A good example of this is UNEPs pilot project focusing on the importance of sustainable agriculture as a critical component in building resilient populations against climate and other shocks in the Eastern Cape. But this must be expanded across the country and the rest of the continent.

Secondly, we need to help ensure that ecosystem‑based adaptation becomes central to development planning and agricultural policy. As stakeholders in the environmental space, we need to invest finances and technical expertise towards this endeavour. As Inger Andersen, the Executive Director of UNEP said “nature-based solutions are recognized as integral to global climate action… which demonstrates that it’s not only us that protects nature, but also nature that protects us.”

Thirdly, we need to envisage and implement ecosystem‑based adaptation projects that will enable vulnerable and marginalised communities to equitably access and justly benefit from natural resources. We need coordination and implementation at community-level to ensure that natural ecosystems are managed and utilized sustainably for improved livelihoods and well-being of vulnerable communities, in particular women, youth and persons living with disabilities.

Fourth, we need to ensure that ecosystem‑based adaptation programmes, such as ecosystem restoration, improve decision-making in the short and long term. We must also broaden our thinking and explore opportunities for innovative experiments, pilot projects and scale up initiatives, creating synergies and finding ways of convergence with other initiatives.

Lastly, ecosystem‑based adaptation needs to become the dominant approach across all disciplines that relate to our future development and our efforts to achieve the SDGs.

Ladies and gentlemen, the meaningful participation of women and youth in ecosystem‑based adaptation, as well as innovative finance mechanisms, ideal governance models, and monitoring and evaluation form part of key issues for deliberation and re-imagination.

The theme of the Symposium challenges us to re-imagine and reflect on the work that has been done and still needs to be done to protect and restore ecosystems, adapt to the changing climate and ensure that vulnerable communities are not left behind.

When we rebuild our economies, we must build back greener, better and in partnership with the natural world.  To that end, we must take this Symposium as an opportunity to enhance collaboration and cooperation, to discuss barriers to the implementation of ecosystem-based adaptation and consider opportunities for innovative and catalytic interventions.