A report from the Net Zero Tracker, in which the Blavatnik School is a partner, on how South Africa’s carbon-intensive export model faces mounting pressure in a global economy increasingly shaped by climate policy, clean energy industrial strategies, and cross-border carbon pricing. While the country has a formal net zero target for 2050, this sits uneasily alongside short-term energy choices that favour fossil fuel expansion and delay coal phase-out — undermining confidence in the country’s decarbonisation trajectory and exposing its carbon-intensive exports to growing international risk.
