Gauteng is now the pollution hotspot of SA

Gauteng has the least amount of “clean air days” in South Africa, worse than neighbouring pollution hotspot Mpumalanga, which is home to 12 of Eskom’s coal-fired power plants.

According to a report released by the national air quality officer, the country’s air quality has “regressed” since 2017. Gauteng had only 100 days of clean air in 2023, followed by Mpumalanga with 150-200 days, and the Free State and North West which both recorded about 200 days of clean air.

National air quality officer Patience Gwaze cautioned, however, that these results could be skewed because of a lack of air quality monitoring equipment in some provinces.

Provinces such as Limpopo, the Free State and Northern Cape needed better coverage because of insufficient monitoring to “solidify air quality information”.

“The monitoring stations are also in the areas where we expect the air quality to be the poorest, so an indication of poor air quality in one area does not necessarily apply to the whole province,” she said.

Nevertheless, said Gwaze, this was an indication of “significant” air pollution challenges in Gauteng.

Some factors contributing to air pollution in Gauteng include the “transportation of pollution from Mpumalanga”.

“It is the most densely populated province with a large number of vehicles that contribute to pollution, there are a number of industries in the province and there is a lot of waste burning,” she said.

To address air quality concerns in especially the province’s metros such as Tshwane and Johannesburg, Gwaze is hoping to extend the boundaries of some of the already demarcated priority areas for air quality management.

The three priority areas are the Vaal Triangle airshed, highveld and Waterberg-Bojanala region — areas that require significant intervention to better manage the quality of air.

Gwaze said it was intended to present a proposal to environmental affairs minister Dion George to extend the Vaal Triangle airshed and the Waterberg-Bojanala priority areas to include areas such as the West Rand, Tshwane, Joburg and the entire Bojanala region.

“We are consulting with municipalities, provinces and other stakeholders in the areas affected,” she said.

The recent gazetting of regulation for implementing and enforcing priority area air quality management plans would “significantly improve our ability to implement interventions in these priority areas and intervene with targeted emissions reductions to drive air quality management implementation plans”, Gwaze said.

The regulations were published in August, days before the Supreme Court of Appeal was to hear an appeal in the so-called “Deadly Air” case through which environmental groups have long fought the government’s failure to enforce regulations to ensure better air quality management in the highveld priority area.

Having these regulations published was exactly what they set out to do in bringing the case, said Ntombi Maphosa, an attorney at the Centre for Environmental Rights which represented groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in the matter.

The regulations stipulate, among other things, that priority area air quality management plans must include measurable emission reduction targets.

The regulations, said Maphosa, would help set out practical implementation plans for priority areas.

“We are still studying the regulations, but we have seen a few gaps. For example, we would have liked to see the regulation speak to capacitating local municipalities with having more air quality officers to improve monitoring and other issues such as dysfunctional air quality stations,” she said.

Information from monitoring stations is used for decision making and to track the progress of the implementation of legislation.

South Africa now has 130 government monitoring stations of which 107 are operational but, according to Gwaze, some of the infrastructure is ageing and needs to be replaced.

“To address some of the challenges posed by ageing equipment we have brought in private-owned monitoring stations to assist us in filling the gaps where we don’t have ambient air quality monitoring and to complement monitoring where we do not have sufficient capacity and resources to maintain our own infrastructure.”

Areas such as Richards Bay are fully covered by private-owned network stations.

Apart from ageing equipment and a lack of monitoring stations, other challenges affecting air quality in South Africa include dust pollution from storage and transportation operation at hotspots such as ports, the proliferation of landfill sites and waste burning in communities, and increased veld fires in some provinces.

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