South Africa’s Climate Change Act creates an important opportunity to influence how the country prepares for the effects of climate change. The Act requires government to develop adaptation objectives, scenarios, strategies, and plans across different spheres and sectors.
This factsheet explains how civil society, including labour, can engage with Sector Adaptation Strategy and Plans (SASPs) to advance a climate-just and resilient food system. These plans will translate national adaptation priorities into practical measures for specific sectors, making them an important site for public participation, advocacy, and accountability.
What sector adaptation plans must do
Under Section 22 of the Act, ministers responsible for sectors listed in Schedule 2 must develop and implement SASPs within two years of the publication of the National Adaptation Strategy and Plan.
Each SASP must assess climate risks and vulnerabilities, identify affected areas, ecosystems, and communities, and set out measures to respond. Plans must also explain how these measures will be implemented, monitored, reviewed, and updated.
Because SASPs are intended to shape how departments plan, budget, regulate, and respond to climate risks, they should not operate separately from wider government decision-making. Section 32 requires relevant ministers to provide opportunities for public comment, objections, and meaningful participation.
Why food-system adaptation must extend beyond agriculture
Food-system adaptation is often treated as the sole responsibility of the Department of Agriculture. However, climate change affects the entire system through its impacts on water, land, health, transport, disaster management, labour, and local economies.
Droughts and floods can reduce harvests, limit water for irrigation, disrupt transport routes, threaten farm workers’ health and incomes, and prevent informal traders from accessing and selling food. Effective adaptation therefore requires coordinated responses across departments and spheres of government.
Civil society can use the SASP process to examine how each sector defines climate risk, whose vulnerabilities are recognised, and whether proposed responses address the experiences of those most affected.
Putting justice at the centre
Existing sectoral climate plans have often focused on technical responses, productivity, and competitiveness without adequately addressing structural inequality. New SASPs must place workers, women, small-scale producers, informal traders, subsistence farmers, fishers, low-income households, and affected communities at the centre.
Civil society can advocate for approaches grounded in food sovereignty, including agroecology, land redistribution, equitable water access, support for local food systems, livelihood protection, and stronger public accountability.
A call for coordinated civil society action
The Climate Change Act provides a basis for challenging narrow, top-down adaptation responses and advancing grounded alternatives. Civil society must prepare to participate across multiple sector-planning processes and demand that plans are properly designed, funded, implemented, monitored, and coordinated.
With sustained public engagement, SASPs can become meaningful tools for building a just and resilient food system. Without it, they risk reproducing existing inequalities and becoming fragmented plans that fail the people most exposed to climate risk.