The Portfolio Committee on Environmental Affairs is holding public hearings on the newly released Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate change.
Parliament believes the affected parties should be included, heard and their views considered in formulating local, regional and international approaches to sustainable development, and in tackling climate change challenges. The hearings will be held in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and the North-West. “We… call upon our communities to add their perspectives, knowledge and wisdom in debating and finding optimal solutions to these complex and challenging developmental realties,” Parliament said in a statement. Meeting the MDGs“Significant progress has been achieved in almost all the MDGs in South Africa, but there are also numerous challenges that have not been addressed with the necessary commitment by the various stakeholders…. the MDGs are coming to an end at the end of 2015, and hence the need for new development instruments to deal with new global realities and challenges.” The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), recently released by the United Nations, are widely expected to take over from where the MDGs left and to build on the MDG approach.
“We are aware that the zero draft of the SDGs would receive further inputs from UN member States, including South Africa to ensure that the 17 Goals, 169 Targets and yet to be formulated Indicators are relevant, pragmatic and versatile to address development realities and challenges across the globe,” said Parliament.
Inputs from member states are expected to ensure a bottom-up approach at the national level in both developed and developing countries, and it is for this reason that Parliament, through the Portfolio Committee on Environmental Affairs, seeks a broad participation of South Africans. Climate change “On Climate Change, our morality and policy strategy, which is founded on our socio-economic and ecological realities, would not allow us to deny that climate change is happening, dilute its consequences or delay taking relevant strategic mitigation and adaptation response measures,” said Parliament. “The only option, for us as a nation, is to fight climate change at all levels and on all fronts, and to do this effectively requires us as South Africans of various walks of life to have a shared understanding of the threat at hand by disseminating critical information about the magnitude of the threats that climate change poses to us in order to develop a holistic toolkit of response measures to allow us to respond appropriately to the challenge of climate change at whatever forum we find ourselves.”
