(upbeat music)
-: Founded by President Mandela in 1995,
the NBI is a membership-based organization,
and essentially, our mission
is around responsible corporate citizenship.
We focus on issues such as environment, climate, water,
and energy, youth employability, as well as,
work to support the capacity of government.
-: A couple of years ago, we started to look
into the economic impacts of climate change,
and we found that people were asking the wrong questions.
They were asking, can we afford to transition?
And the reality was, can we afford not to transition?
A just transition in South Africa is critical.
We can't just talk about net zero by 2050,
and think about climate transitions as purely technical.
South Africa's unique triple bottom line of poverty,
inequality, and unemployment really drives the kinds
of analysis that we need to do.
-: It was critical to establish a fact base,
so that we could really address the key issues around
what it's gonna take for South Africa to get to net zero,
and how can we ensure a just transition.
For example, do we just need to solve
for creating net-positive jobs, or do we actually also need
to solve for moving people from
the northeast of the country,
where we have a lot of the coal value chain jobs,
to the southwest of the country,
where we may have better renewable energy resources?
Number two, it helped us address what are some
of the solutions for actually addressing these key issues,
and solutions that are not just theoretical in nature,
but actually have practical implementation.
For example, what sort of policy regulations do we need
in our energy landscape in order to encourage investment
in more renewables?
And lastly, it helped us move away
from ideological discussions.
It allowed us to start from a position
of common understanding and really helps us drive
towards a collaborative way of working towards a solution.
-: NBI and BCG have worked very well together
on this project, combining our respective skill sets
and the deep analytics of BCG and the expert views,
and the local context and political specialty of the MBI.
-: In South Africa, we tend to think that everything
that happens in South Africa is unique.
Being able to benefit from thinking,
and comparative experience, and what has worked
or not worked in other places has been really important.
-: And one amazing moment in the project was we had all
of our CEO champions around the room saying,
look, this work is great.
We all agree.
This is the right way forward.
How do we have this conversation with government?
And at the same time, we had the chair
of the Presidential Coordinating Commission
on Climate Change sitting in the room saying,
look, I've seen the analysis.
It's amazing work.
I'm gonna make sure that I take this to government.
I'm gonna make sure we can drive a cohesive discussion
between business and industry.
-: Reaching that point where we realized that decarbonizing,
in particular the power sector, was something
that was really possible, something that we could do
inside the timelines required by science,
and at very low cost to the economy.
And seeing how stakeholders responded and how positively
they responded was a really exciting moment.
-: When we started this work, I wasn't certain
that South Africa could in fact get to net zero by 2050.
And I think for me,
that has been the most fundamental change, to realize
that actually there are pathways.
They're not simple, they're not easy,
there are very big challenges in the way
of the implementation, but in actual fact,
there is a way that one can do it.