When Promise Mabilo moved to eMalahleni in Mpumalanga, she came for much the same reason many people did: work. She had heard stories of people finding jobs, buying cars and building houses in a city at the centre of South Africa's coal economy. Mines and coal-fired power stations had brought employment and development to the region, but they had also helped create an environmental problem that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Mabilo began attending workshops run by environmental organisations in the community and learning about air pollution and its effects. Her young son had developed serious breathing problems, and the information gave her a new way of understanding what she was seeing around her. Pollution was not simply an unpleasant feature of an industrial landscape. Decisions about how industries operated, how pollution was regulated and whether environmental rules were enforced had consequences for the people who lived there.

There is nothing particularly unusual about acquiring new information. What Mabilo did with it is where the story becomes consequential.

From learning to organising

Mabilo became involved in community environmental work and, in 2016, founded the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action. Vukani's work has included public education about air, water and waste, as well as practical projects such as recycling and community food gardens. It also became part of a much larger campaign around the pollution affecting communities across the Highveld.

By then, the condition of the Highveld's air was hardly a secret. The South African government had declared the Highveld an air-quality priority area in 2007, a designation intended for places where pollution levels were sufficiently serious to require coordinated intervention. An air-quality management plan followed in 2012. Yet years after the problem had been formally recognised, communities were still living with severe pollution and the measures intended to improve air quality had not produced the changes residents had been promised.

The gap between recognising a problem and doing something effective about it became increasingly important. In 2019, Vukani and the environmental justice organisation groundWork, represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights, took the government to court over its failure to implement and enforce the Highveld air-quality plan adequately.

Their case rested partly on one of the rights already contained in South Africa's Constitution. Section 24 states that everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing. Vukani and groundWork argued that the right meant little if government could acknowledge dangerous pollution, develop a plan to address it and then fail to take the measures necessary to make that plan work.

When a constitutional right reaches the air

In March 2022, the Pretoria High Court agreed. In what became known as the Deadly Air case, the court found that the poor air quality in the Highveld Priority Area breached residents' constitutional right to an environment that was not harmful to their health and wellbeing. It also ordered the government to introduce regulations needed to implement and enforce the air-quality management plan.

The minister appealed limited parts of the judgment. The legal process continued for another two years, but shortly before the appeal was due to be heard, something significant happened. On 26 August 2024, two days before the hearing, the government published the regulations that had been at the centre of the dispute.

In April 2025, the Supreme Court of Appeal varied but substantially upheld the earlier ruling. It confirmed that the minister had a legal duty to make regulations when they were necessary to implement and enforce the Highveld plan, and found that the minister had unreasonably delayed doing so.

The distinction matters. Communities had not persuaded government merely to acknowledge that the Highveld had an air-pollution problem; government had acknowledged that itself years earlier. What the litigation helped establish was that recognition carried responsibilities with it. A constitutional environmental right could require action.

THE LONG ROAD TO ACCOUNTABILITY

From official recognition to an enforceable duty

2007 The Highveld is declared an air-quality priority area.
2012 Government adopts the Highveld Air Quality Management Plan.
2019 Vukani and groundWork launch the Deadly Air case.
2022 The High Court finds that Highveld air pollution breaches constitutional rights.
2024 Long-awaited regulations are published two days before the appeal hearing.
2025 The Supreme Court of Appeal confirms the minister's legal duty to act.

Sources: Centre for Environmental Rights and GroundUp. See sources below.

A victory that still has to become real

A court judgment does not remove pollution from the atmosphere. Mabilo has continued to speak about weaknesses in monitoring and enforcement and about the distance between winning a legal case and experiencing cleaner air in everyday life. The judgment created an obligation; making that obligation meaningful still depends upon implementation.

There is another difficulty that makes the Highveld story resistant to simple answers. Coal is both an environmental problem and a source of livelihoods. Mabilo herself originally moved to eMalahleni because of the economic opportunities associated with the region. Mines, power stations and the businesses around them have supported workers and families for generations, which means that closing industries without providing viable alternatives would create another form of hardship.

For that reason, Mabilo has argued for a just transition rather than treating environmental protection and employment as opposing choices. Moving away from coal, in her view, has to include alternative livelihoods, training and opportunities for younger people entering a changing economy. The communities that have borne the environmental costs of South Africa's energy system should not also be expected to bear the economic costs of changing it.

That position makes the work more demanding than a campaign simply for or against coal. It asks how an industrial region can change without treating either people's health or their livelihoods as expendable.

What changed

On 2 September 2026, Stanford University announced that Mabilo had been selected to receive its Bright Award for Environmental Sustainability, recognising her community organising and environmental justice work. The award brings international attention to a campaign that began much closer to home, with residents learning about the environment around them and deciding that they should have some say in what happened to it.

Mabilo was neither the scientist who first measured the Highveld's pollution nor the lawyer who argued the constitutional case. The eventual result depended on many kinds of expertise: environmental organisations that shared information, residents who organised, researchers who documented pollution, lawyers who understood how to translate the problem into a constitutional argument, and communities willing to remain involved while a legal process stretched across years.

That progression is one of the more interesting parts of the story. Access to information did not solve the problem, but it changed what people were able to do about it. Mabilo has described learning about pollution through community workshops before becoming an organiser herself. Vukani then helped other residents understand environmental issues and participate in decisions affecting their communities. Knowledge moved outward rather than remaining the property of specialists.

The result was not simply greater awareness. It became organised pressure, litigation, regulations and a judgment clarifying what government was legally required to do.

A thought for today

It is tempting to measure stories like this at the point of victory: the court ruling, the new regulations or, eventually, cleaner air. Mabilo's story is useful partly because those stages do not arrive together. The Highveld was declared an air-quality priority area in 2007. Regulations intended to give effect to its management plan were published seventeen years later, after communities had gone to court. Even now, implementation remains part of the work.

What changed much earlier was the position of the people living with the problem. Residents who might once have encountered pollution simply as part of the landscape acquired the information, organisations and legal support needed to challenge decisions being made around them. They did not have to become scientists or constitutional lawyers themselves. They needed access to people who knew different parts of the problem, and a way of bringing that knowledge together.

Mabilo has said that a good day for her is one in which she does something for her community. There is something appropriately ordinary about the statement. The eventual court victories were built from years of work that was much less visible: meetings, workshops, organising, explaining, listening, challenging officials and returning to the same problem when it had still not been resolved.

The air over the Highveld is not yet the measure of success that the communities themselves are asking for. But their campaign has already demonstrated something worth keeping in view. Knowing that a problem exists and having the power to respond to it are different things. Sometimes the work begins by shortening the distance between the two.

THE REPORTING BEHIND THE STORY

Read the GroundUp profile

Ihsaan Haffejee's 2024 reporting follows Promise Mabilo in eMalahleni, including Vukani's community work, the Deadly Air litigation and the food garden shown in the photograph above.

Read the GroundUp report

Sources and further reading

Image credit

Hero image: Promise Mabilo working in a community food garden in eMpumelelweni, Mpumalanga. Photograph by Ihsaan Haffejee / GroundUp. Licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0. The photograph should be reproduced without alteration beyond technical resizing required for display.