Centre for Environmental Rights – Advancing Environmental Rights in South Africa

This year marks the fifth edition of the Centre for Environmental Rights’ annual Environmental Rights & Remedies Course for environmental justice activists.

The Environmental Rights & Remedies Course forms a key component of CER’s activist support and training work. Developed in response to demand from our community partners for rights training, the course builds on existing initiatives like groundWork’s Environmental Justice School to empower participants from rural and urban areas who bear the environmental and socio-economic brunt of polluting industries operating close to their homes and places of work.

The theme for the 2021 course is Women and Environmental Justice. This theme acknowledges that we operate in an environment with a deeply-rooted culture of gender inequality. Due to historically gendered divisions of labour, women are heavily dependent on the land as a source of food, and their labour in the domestic realm brings them in close proximity to sources of pollution and the effects of climate change. This year, in addition to the course’s usual outcomes, we are also intending to build a cohort of empowered and connected women leaders for the climate and environmental justice movement.

The course will also continue to focus on practical training outcomes, imparting legal knowledge, and equipping participants with the skills necessary to facilitate engagement with government and industry. This will include the use of statutory remedies (e.g. writing complaint and objection letters, reporting environmental violations, and using access to information laws).

The course will also include practical sessions on topics ranging from organising stakeholder meetings and media engagement to effective presentation skills and record-keeping. Participants will be issued with stationery, including a laptop computer to assist with their work on environmental justice.

This year the course will take place virtually in September and October (the exact dates will be announced at a later stage). We are inviting nominations of prospective participants to the course from community-based organisations, civil society, and activists in the environmental and climate justice movement.

To apply or nominate someone for this course, download the Call for Nominations: Environmental Rights and Remedies – a training course for activists. The closing date is 31 July 2021.

For enquiries, please contact Sibo Buyangane, at [email protected].

Please note: In the unlikely event that insufficient funding is available, the course may be postponed until further notice.