Professor Celine Tan from Warwick Law School contributed to the South Africa Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) Consultation on the Just Energy Transition Plan (JET-IP). The JET-IP is part of a multi-country funding initiative, the Just Economic Transition Partnership (JETP), by a coalition of developed countries to support a number of developing countries' transition away from dependence on coal and other fossil fuels. The JETP has been described as an innovative funding model that will assist developing countries in their efforts to mitigate climate change while addressing the social and economic impacts that will arise from decarbonisation of the economy.

The submission, co-authored with Dr Anil Yilmaz Vastardis from Essex Law School and Dr Gamze Erdem Türkelli from the Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp, welcomes the alignment of the proposed JET-IP with South Africa’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), a climate action plan to cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change that is required of all members states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the Paris Agreement.

However, the authors have identified three concerns with the proposed financing package in the JET-IP which could undermine the climate and sustainable development objectives and fiscal alignment, and that potentially give rise to legal, regulatory, policy and governance risks beyond the JET-IP. These are reliance on debt instruments as a means of funding the JET-IP; reliance on private sector financing and the use of official sector finance to catalyse private finance and limited financial and social safeguards to communities who will be affected by planned reforms and programmes under the JET-IP. The submission outlines key areas of fiscal, legal and social risks posed by these three features of the JET-IP. These include financial regulatory and policy risks, investment law risks and socio-economic transition and governance risks.

The submission fed into a wider consultative document submitted to the PCC with the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in South Africa.

Professor Tan, Dr Yilmaz Vastardis and Dr Erdem Türkelli are members of the Climate Finance for Equitable Transitions (CLiFT), a sub-project of the New Frontiers in International Development Finance (NeF DeF). CLiFT is a multi-institutional and multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at exploring the climate finance supply chain within the context of the multilateral climate change regime, international financial architecture and the multi-layered landscape of international economic law.

You can view the JET-IP submission here.