Businesses ‘struggling to turn sustainability ambitions into action’, surveys reveal

Coca-Cola has revealed for the first time it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year – equivalent to 200,000 bottles a minute – as a report calls on other global companies to end the secrecy over their plastic footprint. The data from the soft drinks manufacturer was provided to the campaigner Ellen MacArthur, who is pushing for major companies and governments to do more to tackle plastic pollution. The figures – which the company has refused in the past to disclose – reveal the amount of plastic packaging Coca-Cola produced.

Sea-level rise is not a major threat in South Africa but, tied with other climate crisis consequences, it can become one. Here’s how higher sea levels could affect the country’s coastal cities. With the world heating up, countries are expected to make ambitious efforts to keep global temperature rise below 1.50C at the upcoming COP26 negotiations. Africa, one of the most vulnerable regions to the climate crisis, is likely to get hotter at twice the global rate, with sea-level rise a consequence. For a long time, global warming was almost solely a phenomenon associated with melting glaciers. Alongside this notion were images of polar bears stranded on cracked-off pieces of ice — and land expected to almost disappear as it was swallowed by sea-level rise.