Climate shift is new plank in political platforms
July 24, 2008
By INGI SALGADO
Climate change was a hot election issue in Australia last year: a five-year drought helped to usher in the Mandarin-speaking Labour leader Kevin Rudd, who had pledged that his first act of governance would be to sign the Kyoto protocol.
US polls say almost two-thirds of voters want the next president to initiate strong action to address climate change once the incumbent takes office early next year.
And global warming will be uppermost in the minds of many of the half-billion people who will elect members of the European parliament next year.
South Africans also head to the polls next year, but global warming will compete with other priorities for a place in the national discourse.
Climate change is likely to get strong mention in party manifestos, but greater emphasis will probably fall on immediate bread-and-butter issues of survival, such as ways to cope with soaring food prices.
This is probably true of many of the world's developing nations, to which globalisation has delivered fewer benefits than their developed country counterparts.
Yet it is the citizens of poorer nations who will be worst affected by rising temperatures. For example, research from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that the phenomenon will cause between 75 million and 250 million Africans to suffer additional water stress by 2020, by which time farmer yields are likely to drop by 50 percent.
These kinds of sobering forecasts suggest that even if climate change has little impact now on voter choices, there is bound to come a time when it will - and probably sooner rather than later.
Peter Vale, the Nelson Mandela professor of politics at Rhodes University, expects climate change to be a minor issue for the South African electorate next year.
"But my prediction is that the person who is South Africa's president in 10 years' time will have this at the top of their agenda," he says. "This is an issue that will not go away."
Vale predicts that the youth, which he defines as the under-30s, will take on climate change in much the same way as the youth of the past embraced the anti-apartheid struggle and the youth of today are involved in Aids activism.
While it is possibly true that politicians follow where the public leads, our relatively limited public engagement on climate change will not deter the government from charting a course to deal with global warming that is bound to affect most aspects of state policy for decades to come.
If an electorate is not switched on to the effects of global warming, then the government it chooses has greater freedom to determine climate change policy - in tandem, of course, with the business sector.
Al Gore, the former US vice-president and climate change campaigner, said last week that Americans needed to change "not just light bulbs, but laws".
His comment aptly sums up why South Africans' voting choices do matter when it comes to global warming.
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