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The Portfolio Committee on Environmental Affairs in the Parliament of the Republic of South Africa is holding public hearings on the newly released Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Climate Change and the killing of South African Rhino populations in the three provinces of KwaZuilu-Natal, from 28th to 30th August 2014; Mpumalanga, from 4th to 6th September 2014; and the North-West, from 11th to 13th September 2014.

The issues that we are holding public hearings on are wide-ranging and complex. However, we strongly believe that in every development issue, it is imperative that the beneficiaries, and the affected parties should be included, heard and their views considered in formulating local, regional and international approaches to sustainable development, and also in tackling the kind of challenges that we face from climate change and the killing of our Rhinos.

Throughout the history of our democratic country, we have valued the contributions of our people, and it is in this respect that our Government at all the three spheres seeks to involve the masses of our people in working together to find solutions to challenges that face us as a country, continent and the world. We therefore call upon our communities to add their perspectives, knowledge and wisdom in debating and finding optimal solutions to these complex and challenging developmental realties.

We are all aware that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were adopted in 2002, have been important instruments in streamlining and coordinating international development action. Significant progress has been achieved in almost all the MDGs in South Africa, but there are also numerous challenges that have not been addressed with the necessary commitment by the various stakeholders. Most importantly, the MDGs are coming to an end at the end of 2015, and hence the need for new development instruments to deal with new global realities and challenges. It is in this respect that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) formulated and recently released under the auspices of the United Nations, are widely expected to take over from where the MDGs left and to build on the MDG approach. It is worth noting that the SDGs are to maintain poverty eradication as the central objective, with a more balanced and holistic equity and rights-based approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. We are aware that the zero draft of the SDGs would receive further inputs from UN member States, including South Africa to ensure that the 17 Goals, 169 Targets and yet to be formulated Indicators are relevant, pragmatic and versatile to address development realities and challenges across the globe. Inputs from member States are expected to ensure a bottom-up approach at the national level in both developed and developing countries, and it is precisely for this reason that Parliament through the Portfolio Committee on Environmental Affairs seeks a broad participation of South Africans, particularly the marginalised at the grassroots to guarantee that their voices are listened to and their needs seriously addressed in current debates leading to the adoption of a post-2015 development pathway. We believe that when we stated in our Constitution that “Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being; and to have the environment protected, for the benefit of present and future generations,” we are, in effect, saying that people who have rights are mature and responsible citizens, who have the ability to effectively participate in the development and protection of the environment. This thinking underpins the public hearings that we are holding.

On Climate Change, our morality and policy strategy, which is founded on our socio-economic and ecological realities, would not allow us to deny that climate change is happening, dilute its consequences or delay taking relevant strategic mitigation and adaptation response measures. The only option, for us as a nation, is to fight climate change at all levels and on all fronts, and to do this effectively requires us as South Africans of various walks of life to have a shared understanding of the threat at hand by disseminating critical information about the magnitude of the threats that climate change poses to us in order to develop a holistic toolkit of response measures to allow us to respond appropriately to the challenge of climate change at whatever forum we find ourselves. There is a need for us to be consistent whether we are acting locally and thinking globally, or acting globally and thinking locally about communities in rural poor parts of South Africa. We would like those in our Government to be acutely aware of those they represent when they are negotiating climate change agreement with other Parties on relevant multilateral climate change negotiating forums. We want our climate change negotiators at COP20 in Lima, Peru, and at COP21 in Paris, France, to be aware of the needs of a rural mother and a herdsmen in the most rural part of South Africa to ensure that the mitigation, adaptation, technology and climate finance agreement that they agree to, is a win-win agreement for our people who today bear the full brunt of climate change impact in a myriad of ways, including those that threaten their own very existence.

Finally, as South Africans, we are all concerned about the sharp rise in the killing of our Rhinos in the past few years. This has threatened to reverse the hard-won population increases achieved by conservation authorities during the 20th century. Until relatively recently, thanks to law enforcement efforts, poaching of Rhino had been kept under control and held at relatively low levels. However, from 2008 onwards, Rhino killing has escalated at an alarming rate, threatening to behave like a runaway train. For example, Rhino killing in 2013 remains at historically high level, with more than a thousand animals killed despite the increased clamp down on illegal killing of Rhinos at all levels (e.g., increased court sentences and law enforcement). More than 600 Rhinos were killed, as of 31st July 2014, threatening to overshoot last year’s all-time high, if the present trends continue. Our Government and relevant stakeholders understand the difficulty in stopping Rhino poaching, and it is in this context that concerned institutions in Government and relevant stakeholders proposed and implemented various strategies to stop or even derail the killing activities in South Africa’s protected areas. However, the biggest stumbling blocks to all kinds of anti-poaching strategies are the immense and ever increasing rates at which the animals are killed; and the vastness of Rhino distribution, which combined with the guerrilla tactics of the poachers, make counterinsurgent measures very difficult to establish.

We need to develop a ‘political community of interest’ around the protection of our Rhinos, particularly closer to where the Rhinos are being illicitly killed. We understand that rural communities that surround and/or live near our national parks are the base of Rhino security system, if our Rhinos have to be protected in the face of ongoing onslaught. They are the gate-keepers of success or failure to protect Rhinos effectively. It is with this in mind that we call these public hearings on the protection of our Rhinos in the three provinces with the aim of assessing the efficacy of current anti-poaching measures to determine what we should be doing differently, considering the relentless killing that has led to dramatic increases in the number of killed Rhinos.