Can South Africa's sugar industry contribute to clean energy supply?: lessons from best practices in cogeneration

AISA Policy Brief no. 119, OctoberThe 2015 budget speech by the South African Minister of Finance echoed the need to resolve the country's energy challenge and revitalise agriculture as the top two strategic priorities for economic growth and development. Eskom, South Africa's public electricity utility, continues to grapple with the challenge of meeting the rapidly growing demand of electricity. Repeated bouts of load shedding have been a clear testimony to this challenge. There is a desperate need to ensure the security and reliability of the country's energy supply in order to deal with the structural and competitive challenges which are retarding its growth. This brief argues that the sugar industry can contribute significantly towards addressing South Africa's energy supply challenge in a sustainable way. This argument is based on the results of a spatial systems dynamics model demonstration which simulates the overall electricity production from sugarcane production systems. The results provide interesting insights that should certainly drive and encourage more investment in bio-electricity generation, with projections of a supply of over 1950 GWh of electricity per annum. Tapping from best practices in the field of cogeneration, the sugar industry has the potential to help ensure sustainable energy security for South Africa by supplying additional electricity to the national grid in a way that avoids greenhouse gas emissions

Disrupting cycles of violence in Africa: unlocking complex dimensions of human security

AISA Policy Brief, no. 124, OctoberDisrupting the matrix of domination that feeds systemic inequality and poverty in violence ridden societies unlocks complex dimensions of human security. Self-reproducing cycles of chronic violence, driven by a multifaceted combination of structural and interpersonal factors, undermine any efforts to achieve such security. This policy brief discusses a range of negotiation processes that can mobilise communities to engage in social actions that supply in their own security and peace-making needs. The discussion generates crucial insights and knowledge that may inform and strengthen community-based 'whole-of-society' strategies for the prevention of violence and its gendered dynamics

Strategies for managing complex social-ecological systems in the face of uncertainty: Examples from South Africa and beyond.

Improving our ability to manage complex, rapidly changing social-ecological systems is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. This is particularly crucial if large-scale poverty alleviation is to be secured without undermining the capacity of the environment to support future generations. To address this challenge, strategies that enable judicious management of socialecological systems in the face of substantive uncertainty are needed. Several such strategies are emerging from the developing body of work on complexity and resilience. We identify and discuss four strategies, providing practical examples of how each strategy has been applied in innovative ways to manage turbulent social-ecological change in South Africa and the broader region: (1) employ adaptive management or comanagement, (2) engage and integrate different perspectives, (3) facilitate self-organization, and (4) set safe boundaries to avoid system thresholds. Through these examples we aim to contribute a basis for further theoretical development, new teaching examples, and inspiration for developing innovative new management strategies in other regions that can help address the considerable sustainability challenges facing society globally