The eThekwini Municipality is planting more than 62 500 trees to wash away the "climate sins" of 2010 World Cup visitors and to create a new "green lung" in the rapidly growing northern part of the district. The trees will be planted next to the municipality's newest and biggest rubbish dump, the Buffelsdraai landfill site near Verulam.

I suspect that decades of addiction to fossil fuels have left an oily residue of corporate disbelief around the affordability proposition. But it's hard to ignore a reputable McKinsey study that shows it is within our means to hold the rise in global warming within 2°C above preindustrial levels, the threshold generally regarded as the trigger for catastrophic climate change.

Environmentally responsible or 'green' procurement is the selection of products and services that minimize environmental impacts. It requires a company or organization to carry out an assessment of the environmental consequences of a product at all the various stages of its lifecycle. This means considering the costs of securing raw materials, and manufacturing, transporting, storing, handling, using and disposing of the product.

The effects of climate change pose serious social, economic and environmental threats to the world today. Over the next 50 years an estimated 200 million people will be displaced due to the rising sea level. 15-40% of the Earth’s species face extinction, and the malaria death toll will be greatly increased due to the expansion of the tropics.