The Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Dion George, has championed his department’s efforts at job creation. 

According to the minister: “Every government decision must be judged by whether it creates work. In our department, we can say with confidence that our programmes do exactly that. They provide jobs today while building the skills South Africa needs tomorrow.”

The minister maintains that: “Through the Expanded Public Works Programme, the department has committed to creating 121 059 work opportunities over the next five years, equal to more than 77 000 full-time jobs. Sixty percent of these opportunities will go to women, 55 percent to youth, and 2 percent to persons with disabilities.”

South Africa’s unemployment rate is roughly six times the global average. Bheki Mahlobo told The Common Sense that South Africa would need to create more than 500 000 net new jobs a year for the next 20 years in order to bring the unemployment rate down to nearer 10%. This is more than five times the rate of job creation of recent years.

Critics maintain that decisions taken by the environmental affairs department with regards to climate ideology and net-zero commitments have cost South Africa hundreds of thousands of jobs by hounding out investment and thereby contributing to pinning the economic growth rate to near 1%.

The minister, however, believes that: “the National Employment Vulnerability Assessment (NEVA) ensures that workers in coal, metals, petroleum, agriculture, and tourism are supported with resilience plans. This makes the country’s just transition practical, not abstract, by ensuring that people in older industries are equipped to participate in the new economy.”

The NEVA is a government programme to retrain workers and help them find new jobs in the event that they lose their existing jobs as a consequence of environmental regulations. 

According to the minister: “Our programmes show that climate action and job creation are the same project.”