The story of a vegetable garden in rural South Africa shows how communities can drive climate action

A long-standing idea in environmental research is that people are more likely to care about the environment, and do something to prevent environmental damage, once they earn enough to stop worrying about paying their bills. But what happens in rural communities with high levels of poverty, where money is scarce and environmental changes directly affect people's livelihoods?

We are economists who wanted to find out what explained environmental action best: income levels, or the strength of people's connections to their fellow community members.

We carried out research in Hlokozi, a rural village in southern KwaZulu-Natal, about two hours' drive from the coastal city of Durban in South Africa. In this village, homesteads are scattered across steep grassland, home to roughly 2,000 households. Formal jobs are scarce and most families earn an income through a mix of smallholder crop and livestock farming, social grants and money sent home by relatives working in cities.

Hlokozi also faces real climate pressure – it's been affected by severe storms and floods over the past four years. For the smallholder farmers there, already dealing with erratic rainfall, drought spells and soil erosion, environmental action is not a lifeclass choice. It protects livelihoods.

For one of us (Biyase), Hlokozi is home, the village where he grew up. The other (Kirsten) first came here as a doctoral student in 2019, and we have returned together ever since, with household surveys and community projects.

In March 2025 our research team, as part of a household survey collection project, helped clear and plant a food garden at a high school in Hlokozi. The garden covers about a quarter of a soccer field on the school grounds and grows cabbage, spinach and other vegetables for the school's feeding scheme.

When we returned six months later, the community had taken over the school garden completely. Parents had extended the fencing and set up a water system using a storage drum. Residents had nominated a former farmer to look after the garden. Nobody was paid to do any of this. The garden now helps feed around 200 learners at the school.

Our previous research on people's concern about the environment and what they actually do, and how that gap differs by income in South Africa, had already found that people with lower incomes were often more likely to take practical environmental actions, such as recycling, than people with higher incomes. Wealthier people were more likely to say they cared about the environment, but were less likely to turn that concern into action.

Yet many environmental and climate programmes rely on an assumption that finances are needed for people to start caring for the environment. A well-known example is payments for ecosystem services, where farmers or landowners are paid to protect forests, wetlands or grasslands instead of clearing them. The logic is that money changes behaviour: pay people and they conserve; stop paying and the behaviour is expected to fade.

Our research in Hlokozi found that this was not the case. Instead we found that people's sense of connection to their community was more closely linked to environmental action than their income. This means that climate policy that works with those ties, rather than around them, will go further than policy that waits for incomes to rise.

Measuring ubuntu

We wanted to measure the strength of each person's ties to the community, using an index we built around the philosophy of ubuntu – umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, “a person is a person through other persons”.

This was, to our knowledge, the first attempt to quantify ubuntu itself in environmental economics.

To do this we surveyed households across the village. We asked residents about the everyday environmental actions they took, such as reducing water usage, limiting plastic consumption, recycling, planting trees, using public transport, and purchasing environmentally friendly products.

Not all of these are things people freely choose to do. In Hlokozi, for example, many people use public transport because they do not own cars, and saving water is partly a necessity because water is scarce. The other four actions require more conscious effort.

We also asked five questions about how people practised ubuntu in terms of trust in their neighbours, willingness to help one another, pride in their community, a sense of belonging, and shared responsibility for its future.

We then measured each person's ubuntu-based ties to the community and looked at whether those who felt more strongly bound to their neighbours and their village took more action to protect the environment.

What we found

Our research found that the stronger the ubuntu connections, the more environmental actions the people we interviewed took. And ubuntu connections were also linked to the actions that required a conscious choice. We found no indication that earning more money made households more likely to take environmental actions.

To put this in practical terms, imagine two neighbours. One, who has weaker connections to the community, saves water. The other, who has stronger connections, saves water and plants trees. Across all the people we studied, the difference worked out to about half an additional action per person on average. This can make a substantial difference.

The school garden shows what this looks like on the ground. Saving water, managing waste and keeping a communal garden alive do not require much money. What they do require is people working together: one person's effort is much more likely to pay off if their neighbours also contribute. Strong community relationships can help build that trust. The community kept the garden running and even improved it during the months when no researcher or outside programme was there to support it.

What needs to happen next

First, development and climate adaptation finance needs to be channelled more towards local projects. These are anchored in schools and communities, such as community gardens, water committees, and community-based management of all natural resources. These kinds of projects give collective effort a visible, shared focal point.

Second, organisations and government departments that design climate adaptation projects in rural areas must measure and build on existing community ties rather than treating rural residents as isolated individuals who will only take action if they are paid.

Third, government must still deliver flood defences, restored catchments and early-warning systems. Communities cannot provide costly infrastructure themselves.

This matters well beyond one village. South Africa and its development partners are deciding how to spend money to help rural communities cope with climate change. Many projects bring in outside funding and pay people to take part – a stipend here, an incentive there. But when the funding ends, some projects stall because they lack a strong local network of people who can continue working together after the money runs out.

The research in Hlokozi has been supported by University of Johannesburg research grants, including funding from the University Research Committee. The authors have received no external funding relevant to this article

Mduduzi Biyase is affiliated with University of Johannesburg.

By Johann Frederich Kirsten, Associate Professor in the School of Economics, University of Johannesburg And

Mduduzi Biyase, Professor of economics, University of Johannesburg

   Comments0