- Closing Remarks from South Africa’s National Treasury Director General, Dr Duncan Pieterse, at the Climate Resilience Symposium provided updates on JET Programme and carbon credit trading.
“It was noted that international support for South Africa’s just transition through the JETP programme has been encouraging, but challenges remain, including low levels of grant availability and expectations for sovereign guarantees in the support linked to State Owned Entities (SOE”s) and municipalities. We will therefore continue to work closely with our development partners to increase the scale of concessional funding, and to make sure that the terms of the funding and the risk appetite of the lenders is in line with the capacity of our municipalities and SOEs,” said Pieterse.
He emphasised the need to work together to develop a comprehensive JET project pipeline that can be linked to the available concessional funding. “The infrastructure reforms that the National Treasury is currently working on for announcement at the time of the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement in October, will be important to support this work. In particular, the emphasis from today’s session on pipeline visibility and the capacity required to build these project pipelines are both very welcome,” he said.
Carbon credit trading
National Treasury plans to lay out proposals for regulating the trade in carbon credits. A credible, well-functioning carbon credit market, which reduces the cost of climate resilient assets, is being developed. The rules will ensure that credits aren’t duplicated and once sold, cannot be reissued. To provide policy certainty to taxpayers, a discussion paper outlining proposals for the second phase of the carbon tax will be published for public comment and consultation later in the year.
link to the DG’s full speech HERE: 2024071701 Closing Remarks By DG Dr Duncan Pieterse – Climate Resilience Symposium
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
