Secret Mission in the Cederberg by Jill Morsbach

The polluted, overcrowded earth, one and a half centuries from now, is dying. Benny de Vos discovers as a twelve-year-old that he was born in this future time and has been sent back by his scientist father in a time bubble, to undertake a critical Mission to Save Planet Earth.

Benny’s father has given him a unique thought-waving power as well as a list of evils that he must eradicate in order to ensure the future of the planet. The evils on the list all concern man’s destruction of nature. But Benny is still in junior school and the Mission seems to be a daunting task. Using his thought power in the present-day environment, where he lives as a foster child in the Cederberg mountains north of Cape Town, he secretly strives to fight these evils.

He is helped by his foster cousin, Emma, and his friend, Donovan, who is struggling to come to terms with the deaths of his father and sister, killed in a taxi war on the Cape flats. However, in every step of his Mission, Benny unintentionally wreaks local havoc. In the end, he hasn’t saved the planet but has managed to save other things which are of importance in his own small world.