ROLE OF LEGISLATORS IN CLIMATE CHANGE: THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICA
possible to incorporate aspects that would ratify the new international climate treaty. Reviewing and amending of existing legislation is particularly useful for legislators in many national legislatures who rarely have the necessary legal support staff to develop large-scale bills or proposals for climate change. Moreover, amending existing legislation is a much more feasible undertaking, with a comparatively high success rate, although this option has run out for South Africa, as the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act No 39 of 2004 can no longer be amended to incorporate further regulation of climate change, as done in previous years.
• Costing and financing of domestic Climate Law: Legislative Acts and policy
18 | The Parliamentarian | 2016: Issue One
initiatives most often produce costs and benefits for society as a whole, and hence there is a need to have a sound analysis of new Legislative Acts and measures to determine whether benefits typically coincide with the reason why they were formulated. It is imperative that legislators ensure that the cost of a climate change law is estimated and budgeted for, to ensure effective implementation. We must ensure that targets contained in the law are worked into deliverable programmes for government departments with precise targets to ensure effective oversight of government departments and entities in terms of budget for those programmes, timeframes and obvious results on the ground. Parliamentary committees need to be
scientific in their thinking and work, precise and deliberate in deepening the culture of accountability and transparency in their nations, more so, for us as South Africans.
• Exercising leadership in mobilising private climate finance: we do understand that legislators play an indirect role in mobilising international climate finance (whether via the Financial Mechanism, which is under the Convention or outside the Convention through the Climate Investment Funds, which is under the World Bank). However, legislators have a critical role to play in mobilising private climate finance by passing innovative laws that entail favourable risk-return ratio and/or risk mitigation measures to spur private investment in climate change mitigation and
adaptation.
• Building of reporting provisions in climate legislation and
parliamentary oversight models: legislators can facilitate climate change oversight procedures by the introduction of regular reporting provisions into climate change law to enable focused attention to climate change, considering that effective oversight can be hampered by the lack of relevant data and reports for Parliamentarians to work with. Without the necessary information coming through from relevant government departments, other organs of state or agencies, appropriate oversight is practically unfeasible. By legally enshrining a department’s obligation to report on a regular basis, legislators are more likely
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