Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 27 July 2010
A meeting of the BASIC group, formed by Brazil, South Africa, India and China, ended on Monday without consensus on a unified plan to deal with the global climate change.
The group, which met in [...]
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 04 May 2010
South Africa is one of the driest countries in the world and its water sources are far from its biggest economic centres.
Business Leadership South Africa and the Centre for Development and Enterprise [...]
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 27 April 2010
The third meeting of BASIC Ministers on climate change took place in Cape Town from 25 to 26 April 2010.
During their deliberations, Ministers emphasised the following:
1. The BASIC Ministers expressed their determination to continue to show leadership in acting on climate change.
2. Developing countries strongly support international legally binding agreements, as the lack of such agreements hurts developing countries more than developed countries. They noted that internationally binding legal agreements already exists in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its’ Kyoto Protocol. In accordance with the Convention, Brazil, China, India and South Africa are taking ambitious nationally appropriate mitigation actions, as announced in Copenhagen.
3. The Ministers agreed that in accordance with the mandate of the Bali Roadmap, such agreements must follow two tracks and include an agreement on quantified emission reduction targets under a second commitment period for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol, as well as a legally binding agreement on long-term cooperative action under the Convention. Ministers felt that a legally binding outcome should be concluded at Cancún, Mexico in 2010, or at the latest in South Africa by 2011. Continue reading BASIC Ministers issue joint statement
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 01 April 2010
Ministers and officials from ten countries and territories in East Africa yesterday endorsed or signed off on a potentially far-reaching protocol to protect East Africa’s coastal and marine environment from land-based activities and pollution.
The new protocol – five years in the making – makes the western Indian Ocean the third marine area of the world to achieve a multilateral agreement to limit and control land-based impacts on the marine environment, after the Mediterranean (1980) and Wider Caribbean (1999).
The parties to the agreement are Madagascar, Comoros, Seychelles, Reunion, Mauritius, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa, which will be signing the protocol in the near future.

Durban Beach. Burgeoning cities such as Durban are threatening the very resource base that sustains them.
“This agreement comes at an opportune time, and will be assisting us with our initiatives in coast East Africa to save one of the few remaining areas of the world that are still unspoilt,” said Dr Amani Ngusaru, head of WWF’s Coastal East Africa Marine Programme.
“Over 60 million people in eastern and southern Africa live and depend on the goods and services provided by the coastal and marine ecosystems of coastal east Africa.” Continue reading Conservation protocol for coastal East Africa