The South African Catholic Bishop’s Conference (SACBC), in association with the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) kick started the SACBC Justice and Peace cycling tour on Wednesday, 9 November.

Today we figured out  from first hand experience why Kimberley is known as the city of diamonds.  We might not have found a hidden bag of jewels, but what we did find was something far more valuable.

'Many hands make light work'. This idiom was particularly true for the Climate Train on Monday, 7 November, when the entire team came together for a collaborative AMbush (guerrilla gardening) on the corner of Market and George Street, Krugersdorp.

'Apartheid seemed an overwhelming challenge that could not be defeated but we mobilised and defeated it. We need the same passion and determination to defeat climate change.'

'She is the frame of the unexpected. A young girl with no rank and no title, just two small hands that carry her entire community. There are no facilities here; there are no green bins that line the streets, just her understanding.'

For the past week we've been doing a lot of climate talk, tree planting and painting with the aim to raise awareness about climate change. We've travelled through four cities and worked with over 3000 children and adults, but when we arrived in Klerksdorp on Friday, we were taught a couple new moves.

Corals are vanishing at an alarming rate, and scientists warn that coral reefs are poised to become the first mass ecosystem extinction. Coral loss also spells trouble for the wide array of marine animals and coastal communities that depend on coral reefs.

Globally governments influence energy and climate change policy by either taxing the excessive use of energy, or granting tax rebates on reduced energy demand.

In the red: We've already eaten into - and substantially so - our future carbon budget, explained Prof Harald Winkler of UCT's Energy Research Centre in his inaugural lecture, 'Climate Change Mitigation in the Context of Development'.

Climate change will be the focus on Wednesday, 14 September, when Al Gore follows up his award-winning film 'An Inconvenient Truth' with the Climate Reality Project, a 24-hour campaign aimed at revealing the complete truth of the climate crisis.

As concerns about the economic impact of climate change grows, more and more businesses and individuals are getting the environmental message at last!  Every action in our lives can stand scrutiny from an environmental perspective.

Business in Cape Town is encouraged to engage with the issues of climate change and sustainability as South Africa prepares to host COP17 in November in Durban.

Accounting bodies around the world agree that a single set of global reporting standards on climate change is needed.

In what might be described as a happy coincidence, or synchronicity, a meeting between a South African delegation member and a United Nations Senior Climate Change Co-ordinator took place in Bavaria, Germany this week.

The German NGO InWent (Capacity building International) hosted delegates from South Africa and Indonesia this week, ending on Friday, 15th, as the kickoff workshop on their year long Climate Leadership programme. Held at their headquarters in Feldafing, this process brought together some 40 delegates from both countries, comprising Government, Civil society and business.

South Africa is warming up three times faster than the rest of the world. While there is currently furious debate about South Africa's energy development path, the country continues to be perceived as one of the world's biggest coal-based economies. Relative to our size, we contribute far more than most countries to climate change.

Governments recognize that they need to speed up and scale up their efforts to combat climate change and they know that negotiations this week in Panama are important to prepare the ground for the next successful step towards that goal in Durban, the UN climate change chief said.

'During this year, governments have been steadily building the pillars that will support the next chapter of the global climate regime. They have recognized very clearly that the current level of effort is not enough and they have realized that it is important to increase both the level of emission controls on greenhouse gases as well as the capacity of countries to adapt to climate change,' said Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

What climate changes have happened so far in SA? Where is all this heading? This is beautifully illustrated in a coffee table type landmark publication recently launched in Stellenbosch: 'Observations on Environmental Change in South Africa,' was published by Sun Media for the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) with funding from the Department of Science and Technology and edited by Larry Zietsman.

'The cost of addressing climate change is manageable, but the cost of not doing so is unaffordable,' said Yvo de Boer, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This was mentioned during a Carbon Literacy course conducted by Adam Green from Global Carbon Exchange (GCX), which I attended this week.

I'm woken by the sound of rushing water. I get up and hang out of the window. A river rushing by? Indeed.

I have lived on dry river banks for many years, so it's a sound I know well. But now we're in a suburb of Windhoek. It's cool and damp and you might think you were in a Cape Town winter, as it never seems to stop raining. Yet this is March and Windhoek is the capital of the driest country in the Sahel.

You might think global warming is something happening elsewhere in the world and that we’re just having a drier/wetter summer than usual, depending on where you live in southern Africa.