Ayanda Kota is a very busy man these days. He has become a household name ever since his Unemployed People’s Movement (UPM) joined forces with other local businesses and activists to take his city’s municipality to court for dereliction of duty.

As people around the world recognised and celebrated World Environment Day 2021 we wondered why efforts to address the climate crisis are not yielding any major victories. We believe that the missing link in ongoing climate actions is the non-recognition that climate change is a social issue.

As dam levels drop in Botswana, dam outflow has been reduced to a minimum due to weather extremes caused by climate change. The country’s dams are no longer able to generate enough water for consumption, leading to the trucking of water and posing health risks to the residents of Molepolole. At the same time residents are battling a water and wastewater tariff increase forecasted for June 1st, 2021.

Between 2008 and 2019, Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, lost 784 hectares of wetlands to structural development, representing a loss of almost half of the city's total wetland hectare. For a city predominantly relying on underground water, the statistics are a major blow when considering that the water sources are recharged from these delicate spaces. However, the process of reclaiming these fragile spaces has seen the poor facing punishment while the rich were spared.

The Namibian government introduced a three-year fishing ban on sardines and pilchards in 2017 to save these fish from becoming extinct. While the damage has been done from overfishing, there are also concerns over how economically unstable the sector has become for workers over the years, as fishermen and factory jobs at the country’s coasts remain in question.

Harare City authorities often run out of water treatment chemicals. But their solution to this problem could worsen an already dire water situation in another suburb and destroy the environment.

Dr. Victor Munnik is an associate researcher at the South African-based environmental justice NGO “Groundwork“. He has worked on their reports, covering coal issues and South Africa’s greenhouse gases emission hotspot, Mpumalanga. As a political ecologist, Dr. Munnik specialises in water quality. The researcher and academic also collaborates with the Water Research Commission, mostly on civil society issues. He works directly with activists and communities, many of them in Mpumalanga Highveld.

A deep democracy Agriculture Green New Deal (AGND) in South Africa is long overdue. It is time to prioritise the economic, social and environmental dimensions of the land question.

It is time for an Agriculture Green New Deal (AGND) in South Africa. It is time for a great transformation, one that factors the social, economic and environmental dimensions of the land question and not just market considerations.

Would you be okay with your government auctioning your country’s wildlife to save it from drought? And would you be okay with them doing so without consulting you?

Many communities in South Africa use coal as a source of energy. Daveyton, a township East of Johannesburg, is amongst one of the communities that rely on coal for personal and private use by local businesses and  street vendors.

Clean drinking water is an inalienable human right and easy access to it has resulted in many communities taking it for granted. For the residents of the Temba township (South Africa), however, access to the precious resource remains elusive. This is because Apies river, the main water source which is meant to sustain the communities water needs, has been degraded to the point where the water is not fit for human consumption.

It’s been over six months since the world turned to the coast of Namibia where more than 7000 starved cape fur seals were discovered dead. But it’s not just seals that are dying, whales and dolphins have also been spotted dead or emancipated along the country’s coast probing scientists to look further into climate and human-related factors that are threatening marine life.

In Malawi the government is failing to fund proper climate change mitigation and adaptation activities. This is worsening environmental degradation in Mulanje District where charcoal and timber business is thriving among poor people who do not have alternative sources of livelihoods.

Climate change is an increasing reality for the rooibos-dependent town of Wupperthal in South Africa’s midwest. The slightest increase in temperatures means a great loss of income for rooibos farmers who are the descendants of the Khoisan community in the remote town. For one local farmer, climate change has been an ongoing and evident phenomena over his lifetime.

Tanzania has been facing climate change affected weather abnormalities for more than ten years now. And it is the ordinary people that are most vulnerable to these extreme weather conditions, especially children. This is the story of Faidha, a sixteen-year young girl from Dar e Salaam whose house is washed away yearly by heavy floods, making it difficult for her to follow her dream to become a pharmacist.

Experts say climate change requires farmers to innovate around production techniques, so they can sustain their livelihoods. Zimbabwean smallholder farmers turn to drought-resilient crops to counter the effects of climate change.

Namibia is one of the countries in Africa that are most severely affected by climate change, resulting in the already dry country becoming warmer and dryer. This leads to decreasing rangeland productivity and farmers being more vulnerable because droughts are more frequent and severe every year. That being said, if farmers change their mind-sets towards adopting sustainable practices, like regenerative agriculture, they can create resilience to the ever-accelerating effects of climate change.

Every year Malawi experiences devastating weather induced by climate change with some districts receiving little to no rain at all. For a country that relies on rain-fed agriculture, the impact is substantial. In the southern region district of Nsanje, drought during the rainy season negatively affects a majority of subsistence farmers in the area.

Since 1987, the waters of the Saloum Delta in Senegal’s Atlantic Ocean front have been rising rapidly, with severe consequences for communities along the shoreline. Up to one kilometre of shoreline has disappeared under water, taking with it many villages, forests and vegetable patches. In many instances, people who lose their homes are forced to leave at very short notice. The Senegalese government has been offering very little support to victims of coastal erosion.

Senegal, like most African countries south of the Sahara, is struggling with an unprecedented crisis caused mainly by persistent climate change. The effects of this phenomenon can be seen in increased temperatures, rising sea levels, growing greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystems degradation and drop in agricultural production which threaten the livelihoods of communities that are dependent on agriculture and fishery. The ocean front is also changing dramatically.

In March 2019, tropical cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. Being one of the worst tropical cyclones on the record, Idai leaft more than 1.300 people dead and thousands of people homeless. Less than two years later, in early 2021, another cyclone hit Beira again, killing six people and leaving the city destroyed. The cyclones are a warning about the seriousness of climate change effects in the region.

Missing electrification abridges economic development in rural areas in Zimbabwe. With the country’s energy company also struggling to pay its debts, 15 to 18 hour daily load shedding schedules are also affecting areas that are already electrified. In Gwanda South District, decentral solar mini-grids supply electricity to irrigation schemes, a clinic, a school and business centres – promoting productivity, more exposure to new technologies and job opportunities.

Ashok Subron is a political and social work activist from Mauritius and the President of the Centre for Alternative Research Studies. Subron was recently part of a group of local Mauritian activists who volunteered to clean up the Mauritian coastal area affected by the MV Wakashio oil spill in July 2020.

On Tuesday, 16th March 2021, Vishwas Satgar, Professor for International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa who is also co-founder of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, delivered a lecture on climate justice as well as his climate activism work in South Africa to participants of the Young African Journalists’ Accelerator Program 2021/22 Cycle. Here are the excerpts.

James Goodman is a Professor in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In 2017 he initiated the Climate Justice Research Centre which focuses on the socio-political drivers for climate justice and define a new research agenda on the centrality of justice concerns for climate action. In this interview, he talks about his career in focusing on climate justice and what he thinks it will need to enable an energy transition in Africa.

Adenike Oladosu, Nigerian climate activist, eco-feminist and eco-reporter, was initially thrust into the world of climate activism after witnessing first-hand how climate change induced shocks negatively impacted the lives of the communities of the Lake Chad region. Lerato Mutsila and Sharon Munjenjema spoke to Adenike Oladuso about her work and her views on the climate justice agenda in Africa.

In the Lake Chilwa Basin in Malawi, the drying up of the lake has become more frequent than usual. The livelihoods of fishermen and many others are affected. Environmental experts attribute the drought to climate change, though some of the affected people do not think so.

In March 2019, tropical Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. Being one of the worst tropical cyclones on the record, Idai left more than 1.300 people dead and thousands of people homeless. With the city of Beira destroyed, the second largest city of the country, Mozambique shouldered the worst consequences. Has Idai changed the way that the country perceives climate change today?

Across Zimbabwe, the impact of a severe El Niño-induced drought continues to drastically affect families in urban and rural areas. Hwange, located in the very Northeast of Zimbabwe, is one such place where loot of natural resources has caused untold suffering and loss of life.

South Africa is Africa’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, largely due to coal mining and coal-fired energy production. Twelve out of 19 coal-powered stations in the country are in the eastern province of Mpumalanga, some 300 kilometres from the city of Johannesburg. The cost of that is everywhere to see; the province’s air and water are heavily polluted, the land is degraded, and its people unhealthy and impoverished.

The entire Southern African Development Community (SADC) is reeling from the effects of multi-year droughts and accelerated heating, exacerbated by the adverse effects of a particularly strong El Niño. An overview.

South Africa has been plagued by persistent drought conditions since 2010. Although international media coverage has largely focused on the “Day Zero” campaign in Cape Town, the country is currently being devastated by two water crises, one of them nature-induced and the other, manmade.