SUMMARY: Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transport will most likely affect employment through a shift from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric and hybrid vehicles. The effects on employment will depend in part on the time required to move to electric vehicles in South Africa and abroad. The extent to which people within the value chain are vulnerable to job losses is influenced by the time frames for the transition to new automotive technologies, which remain highly uncertain. Vulnerable groups identified are: mechanics, partly because of their location in the informal sector, their median age, and a general lack of formal qualifications; workers in the auto industry; and taxi owners and drivers.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: The paper outlines three proposals, accelerating measures to incentivise adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles; enabling taxi owners to adopt dual-fuel technologies to reduce emissions and their carbon tax costs, and ultimately to shift to electric vehicles; promoting active labour market policies, especially retraining, to assist auto mechanics to transition to new occupations if necessary.

SUMMARY: The transition to a low-carbon world will reshape the metals value chain from shifting demand for specific metals to the methods of production to access to essential inputs, such as energy and water. Climate-change impacts will likely affect both supply-side and demand-side dynamics. The most vulnerable groups comprise miners, their communities, and small businesses that supply goods and services to the dominant companies or to miners’ households. Because mining and refining are highly concentrated, nine districts are most vulnerable to changes in the metals value chain as the communities relying on the value chain are rural towns.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Among proposed interventions are extending the Social and Labour Plans to smelters and refineries; promoting technological innovation to reduce long-run job losses; supporting municipalities in the platinum belt to diversify their economies and build long-term resilience and sustainability; strengthen active labour market measures to help miners transition to other livelihoods; providing income support for vulnerable workers and communities during the transition to new livelihoods.

SUMMARY: Due to the environmental impact of coal, emerging cleaner and cheaper technologies and decline domestic and foreign demand, the coal value chain faces significant long-term threats. The report highlights where the employment risk in the value chain lies. The analysis identifies four vulnerable municipalities in Mpumalanga namely eMalahleni, Steve Tshwete, Msukaligwa and Govan Mbeki, and notes that coal miners are the most vulnerable in the value chain, as a result of their lack of financial resources, relatively low skills and limited mobility in the labour market.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: The report presents proposals to implement the Sector Jobs Resilience Plan for the coal value chain; revise guidelines for Social and Labour Plans to give communities and workers more voice; diversify local economies to create more sustainable economic activities; identify skills and needs of vulnerable workers; help vulnerable workers transition into new, sustainable activities; and provide income support for workers and communities during the transition.

SUMMARY: Consensus between stakeholders resulted in a common vision to 2050 that places the Just Transition and the transition to a low-carbon future as central. Disagreements arose around ownership of infrastructure and the whether a zero carbon or carbon-neutral goal was appropriate.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Three key recommendations are put forward. The first calls for the investigation of vulnerable jobs across sectors and formulating plans to absorb job losses. The second involves negotiating labour and social plans for decommissioning coal-fired power stations. The final recommendation is to implement two Just Transition pilots in Mpumalanga (energy) and Free State (agriculture).

SUMMARY: This report explores the main challenges associated with the likelihood that South Africa’s coal production will plunge over the next five to 10 years. The report highlights some of the key issues that need to be thought through and discussed as part of ensuring a Just Transition to this future.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Coal mining communities face a broad variety of impacts. Risks to livelihoods may become a political barrier, exacerbated by institutional dynamics and union resistance. Local stakeholders are more concerned about the local impacts than nationally focused stakeholders, indicating a difference in priorities. The current environmental and mining governance landscape is inadequate for addressing the social and environmental impacts of mining activities.

SUMMARY: The report questions whether resistance to the expansion of coal can drive a Just Transition in South Africa. Transformative resistance requires creating “counter-power” which challenges coal on every level, builds new alliances that generate solidarity, and is potentially infused by imaginative visions of a Just Transition. This could embed the anti-coal struggle in a social movement for an alternative development path. The paper examines oppositional agency in three social spaces: mining-affected communities, the environmental justice movement, and the labour movement.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Priorities differ for each social space: job losses for labour, dispossession of land and livelihoods for rural communities, and extractivism for the environmental justice movement. Anti-coal initiatives could build a “counter-power” which challenges inequality and is infused by visions of another world beyond coal. This could cohere into a vision of a Just Transition’ that is transformative.

SUMMARY: The power sector provides employment in three categories; direct jobs in the power generation project, indirect jobs in the supply of goods and services to the power generation project, and induced jobs in the provision of goods and services to meet consumption demands of additional directly and indirectly employed workers. However, no current accurate measure of jobs or total employment in these categories exists. Current metrics do not provide accurate insight into employment creation in the sector.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: The report notes et al that the coal mining sector is the biggest absorber of unskilled labour and employs approximately 87 500 people. The Renewable Energy Power Purchasing Programme has created tens of thousands of direct jobs, with many more expected in future, as well as induced and indirect jobs. Some studies anticipate greater job losses in coal mining than will be created in RE, nuclear, or gas, while others anticipate a more positive effect in job creation in these activities.

SUMMARY: The Chamber of Mines Coal Leadership Forum, consisting of coal executives, commissioned a report to determine what needs to be done to increase the profile of the coal mining industry in the face of seemingly ineluctable negative public opinion around the use of coal in industrial processes. The report draws attention to the three industries and sectors (electricity sector; liquid fuels manufacture and basic iron and steel industry) that will be adversely affected by enforcement of strict environmental laws in South Africa. The report also considers the impact on coal exports. Domestic constraints are outlined, including factors likely to result in reduced demand for, and supply of, coal.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Four scenarios (2016-2050) with associated coal demand growth rates are presented, from a 1% decline in total coal demand, with nuclear power and renewables supplanting coal as the main primary energy source and environmental and water regulations suppressing coal use, through to a 5% increase in demand growth due to a leap in clean coal technologies, and increase in export demand leading to higher investment and government policy supportive of the industry.

SUMMARY: This report promotes an ecosystems-based approach to promote environmental sustainability and addresses the challenges outlined in the National Development plan. It puts forward forming a Just Transition taskforce driven by the presidency to support the transition process. Several proposals are made to offset the risks of job-losses and support employment creation and intensification in the transition process.

KEY FINDING / RECOMMENDATIONS: Among proposals for job creation/intensification are, in mining, absorbing laid-off miners in infrastructure development, and repurposing abandoned mine shafts for pumped storage of electricity and for other economic activities; in manufacturing capitalising on the construction, installation, and operation of clean energy technologies including green transport vehicles, localising where the country can compete with imports manufacturing renewable energy technologies and localising production of water treatment and water conservation technologies and manufacture; and in energy enabling Eskom to invest in renewable energy.