South Africa’s Paris Era Shift: Falling Emissions Since 2015, But Can 2030 Targets Be Met?

South Africa is often portrayed as a hard case for decarbonisation-coal-heavy power, recurrent energy-security challenges, and pressing socio-economic priorities.Coal still supplies the bulk of the country's electricity, and the system has faced frequent load-shedding and infrastructure constraints in recent years (IEA, 2023; U.S. Department of Energy, 2024).Yet, the country's carbon intensity of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has improved meaningfully in the post-Paris Agreement era (Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, 2021; International Monetary Fund Statistics Department, 2024).Using the World Bank and Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) estimates for total greenhouse gas emissions (GHG, excluding Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry [LULUCF]), population, and constant-price GDP per capita for 1997-2023, I decompose emissions using the Kaya identity into population (P), affluence (A: GDP per capita), and technology (T: carbon intensity, expressed as kg CO2e per 1,000 GDP constant LCU).Average annual changes in each factorwere estimated by fitting log-linear regressions of the natural log of each variable on year, converting the slope to a percentage rate.To assess robustness, I compared two subperiods (1997-2014 and 2015-2023) and conducted sensitivity checks excluding the 2008 global recession and the 2020 COVID-19 shock (World Bank, 2024b, 2024a, 2024c).