27.mars.2009
Join us at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society fora film and discussion
Seminar: Climate Change and Eco-Social Resistance in South Durban (plus the 50/50 documentary by Rehana Dada, Climate Crisis)
Speakers: Lisa Ramsay, Schwarzanne Leafe
Date: Friday, 27 March, 2009
Time: 12:30-2pm
Venue: CCS/SDS seminar room, Memorial Tower Building Room F188 (NOTE NEW VENUE)
University of KwaZulu-Natal Howard College Campus
Next week, South Africa's Climate Summit will be held at Gallagher Estate. The SA government has received good publicity for its Long Term
Mitigation Scenario, but civil society offers heated critiques of the coal/nuclear energy construction programme, and the failure to adjust electricity tariffs to incorporate climate considerations. SA is one of the world's worst CO2 emitters, with an energy sector twenty times worse than the equivalent US sector measured in per capita terms per unit of economic output. But how do such problems relate to people on the ground, in Durban's communities?
A new booklet, "Climate Change for the People of South Durban", is one of the most important social education innovations in community organising, and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance is already one of the world's leading CBO/NGOs on the danger of industrial emissions. In this work, SDCEA's research team - led by Lisa Ramsey - take forward the concerns of vulnerable residents, for whom flooding, rising seas and wetlands, and other extreme weather events add to the existing dangers of living in Ethekwini's main industrial corridor. The issue also may decide the fate of the Durban-Johannesburg petroleum pipeline, which is now bound up in the environmental impact assessment
appeal process because of SDCEA's claims of eco-racism and climate damage.
In addition to a discussion of the booklet (to be available at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs), we will screen the 2007 film made by CCS Masters Student Rehana Dada for SABC's 50/50 tv show: "Climate Crisis".
* Lisa Ramsay is a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University Department of Geography, and primary author of the new booklet.
* Schwarzanne Leafe is a CCS Visiting Scholar attached to the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, and a victim of the area's industrial pollution.(plus the 50/50 documentary by Rehana Dada, Climate Crisis)
Contact Helen Poonen or Oliver Meth on ext 3195