Durban’s Climate Gamble, playing the carbon markets, betting the earth

Published by Unisa Press
First edition, first impression

About the book

Durban, South Africa a city of immense beauty but also a city with deep environmental scars caused by industrial giants and insensitive government. As the hosting city for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conference - COP17 - Durban will be at the centre of the world’s climate negotiations. This book takes the reader on a journey from Durban’s apartheid roots to its somewhat jaded present, passing cultural icons and political battles narrating socio-economic and environmental conflict and the reinvention of the city’s tradition of social protest.

All this creates a context from which the reader can interpret the city’s hosting of the COP17, combined with the reflections of critical political ecologists, socialists, political economists, geographers and environmental activists on Durban’s political ecology, global climate policy and COP politics. In this context we can understand why the COP17 represents a vast climate gamble: will carbon trading solve the Earth’s climate crisis?

It looks at the environmental injustices the Earth will have to endure in the face of the demise of the Kyoto protocol, and looks critically at COP17’s faith in finding market solutions for market problems while it recklessly gambles with the Earth’s future.

The editor, Professor Patrick Bond, directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society. Patrick is a political economist with longstanding research interests and NGO work in urban communities and with global justice movements in several countries. He teaches political economy and eco-social policy at SDS and is involved in research on economic justice, geopolitics, climate, energy and water. He is joined by contributors Ashwin Desai, Joel Kovel, Larry Lohman, Oscar Reyes, Khadija Sharife, The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, Yash Tandon, Goolam Vahed and Del Weston. Climate change. A guide for corporates.