EDITORIAL: Poor enforcement has allowed air pollution to get worse

SA has made good progress with putting in place a legislative and regulatory framework to help address air pollution. Unfortunately, as is often the case in this country, implementing and complying with these rules has been less successful.

Legislation such as the National Environmental Management Waste Act and Air Quality Act provide a framework for how waste and air quality should be managed to protect the environment and give people access to their constitutional right to breathe clean air. However, despite these laws being in place, a recent report released by the national air quality officer shows that the country’s air quality has “regressed” since 2017.

The State of Global Air report released earlier in 2024 by the Health Effects Institute in partnership with Unicef, showed that more than 34,000 deaths were linked to air-pollution-related causes across all ages in SA during 2021 — of these more than 3,365 deaths were children under five years.

The problem is particularly severe in those parts of the country where there are a large concentration of industrial activity and electricity generation from coal. These areas are mostly covered by three demarcated priority areas for air quality management, but the national air quality officer Patience Gwaze has acknowledged the need to extend these areas to include parts of Gauteng, where air pollution is a significant problem, such as the City of Joburg and the City of Tshwane.

In these densely populated areas, additional challenges including pollution from the large number of vehicles on the road, and the unregulated burning of waste contributes to the problem.

Gauteng had only 100 days of clean air in 2023, and previous studies have shown poor air quality can reduce life expectancy for people living in Johannesburg by more than three years. Despite being declared priority areas, air pollution has worsened in the Vaal Triangle and highveld.

Environmental affairs minister Dion George has only now gazetted regulations for implementing and enforcing priority area air quality management plans, which will hopefully improve the implementation of interventions in these areas.

However, publishing the regulations does not solve problems, namely the lack of capacity and resources at the local government level where implementation needs to happen. For those at the front line of implementation it can also feel like they are swimming upstream when the same department seems to routinely make allowances for polluters that will make it more difficult to achieve air quality targets.

In 2023, former environment minister Barbara Creecy granted Eskom permission to bypass emissions standards to implement a temporary fix at Kusile power station. This has helped lessen the need for load-shedding, but environmental groups who opposed the decision warned the increased emissions from Kusile could result in 670 excess deaths and societal costs of as much as R24bn.

Eskom has also been granted relief suspending minimum emissions standards limits at some of its older power stations such as Hendrina, Grootvlei, Camden and Kriel. Again, this will help keep the lights on in SA, but it won’t be without human and other societal costs.

The economic implications of SA being a large emitter of pollutants is often presented as the most important reason the country needs to transition to greener energy and industries. This is understandable given that new trade barriers such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism that will place a tax on imported good from high-emissions countries poses a serious threat to some of SA’s important export industries.

However, the need to reduce emissions that are harmful to people’s health should not be treated as an afterthought.