Climate & Environment

In growth-diagnostics terms, climate and environment bind South Africa not through the usual "low social returns to capital" channel but through a compounding pair of appropriability and infrastructure failures: the country's carbon intensity — still roughly 7 tonnes of CO₂ per capita, among the highest in upper-middle-income economies — exposes exporters to looming border-adjustment regimes (notably the EU CBAM from 2026), while Eskom's coal fleet, load-shedding, and drought-stressed water systems together raise the effective cost of production for precisely the tradeable sectors that should be driving growth. The constraint is binding rather than merely difficult because the shadow price of emissions and ecological risk is now being set *outside* South African jurisdiction — by buyers, lenders, and insurers — and the domestic policy architecture has not yet converted that external pressure into investable projects at scale.

The database entries cluster around this conversion problem. The headline item, the Just Energy Transition Implementation Plan (JET-IP), anchors the $8.5bn international financing package and is the closest thing to a structural solution, but its pace depends on complementary reforms — most obviously the Green Hydrogen and Critical Minerals Regulatory Framework, which would let SA capture rents from platinum-group metals and Northern/Western Cape renewables rather than exporting raw ore, and the more contested Carbon Tax Rate Escalation and Revenue Recycling, which supplies the price signal that makes hydrogen and abatement investment bankable. Running alongside these are slower, distributionally important reforms in fisheries, forestry, and protected areas; the common thread is sequencing, with carbon pricing and JET-IP execution as prerequisites to almost everything else, and with the DMRE, National Treasury, and Presidency's PCC sharing uncomfortably overlapping mandates.

Watch three things over the next year: whether JET-IP disbursements actually translate into grid connection approvals and Mpumalanga repowering contracts, whether Treasury publishes a credible post-2025 carbon tax trajectory aligned with CBAM, and whether the green hydrogen regulatory framework moves from discussion paper to gazetted rules. Movement on any two would suggest the constraint is genuinely loosening.