If the proposed Green Climate Fund committee were able to raise the $100-billion-a-year targeted for disbursement among developing countries by 2020, South Africa stood in line to receive between $1-billion and $2-billion of that amount, Minister in The Presidency Responsible for the National Planning Commission Trevor Manuel reports.

As a disclaimer, Manuel added that the “if” was a “big if”, because, as a part of the transitional committee aiming to raise fast-start finance under the climate regime, he realised that it was “easier extracting teeth than getting them [developed countries] to part with their money.”

“It is going to be a world where there isn’t much sympathy, where wealthy countries are not going to be taking any prisoners, but it does require us to position ourselves, so that we can benefit.”

South Africa would also need to think about how it would extract and use those resources to drive the changes that the country requires. Strong project plans and the capacity to carry those out would be required, while the appropriate legal and financial instruments would also need solid governance arrangements.

Manuel said that South Africa should not wait for other countries to start moving towards a low-carbon economy, and should not fixate on the technicalities of the global climate change negotiations. Instead the country needed to focus on changing its energy intensity, as well as diversifying its sources of energy to a more sustainable mix.

“We must understand that it is unsustainable and change must happen, but we recognise that it is not going to be straightforward and its not going to be easy. In fact, it will be painful and involve some pretty serious costs too.”

South Africans had to come to grips with why it had energy-intensive industries and then seek to move from reacting to challenges to exploiting opportunities.

One of the first changes that required focus, was a change of price. “How do we begin to include emissions in the price of energy? What measure do we want to put on government spending and R&D into alternate energy sources?” he questioned.

These changes would likely be painful and take place in an environment where there was a lot of anger about rising costs, therefore South Africa needed to engage not only with government and those nongovernmental organisations attuned to the climate challenge, but with the whole of society and with labour unions.

“Ours is not just the technical responsibility, it is the societal responsibility, we have to drive this change. In some respects, the fact that we are hosting COP 17 does present us with this opportunity,” he said.

South Africa would host the two-week long global climate negotiations – the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP 17) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Durban from November.

Manuel said that what COP 17 ought to be about was “how we can change society’s response to issues of climate and to our own contributions to what is wrong”.

Manuel said that if stakeholders did not take this opportunity to change who responds to climate issues, and how they respond, “we will have failed.”