It’s the morning after a fierce and blinding hours-long dust storm tore through the |Ai-|Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park in the Northern Cape, and a fine layer of red dust blankets the desert outpost of Sendelingsdrift, a remote border crossing between Namibia and South Africa.
In the park’s blossoming nursery on the Orange River, its curator Pieter van Wyk has spent the morning gingerly spraying water on the rare, endemic and threatened plants housed in this desert sanctuary, many of which are found nowhere else on earth.
Van Wyk, a self-taught botanist, is worried that contaminants from a nearby zinc and lead mine may have blown in and settled on the striking collection of delicately tended flora, some rescued from diamond-mining operations and confiscated from succulent poachers.
These storms have long been a feature of the harsh, desolate wilderness that is the Richtersveld, which boasts the world’s richest desert flora. It’s why unique life forms such as the psammophorous plants have evolved by fashioning a layer of sand to their surfaces to act as a protective shield against the force of sandstorms and sandblasting.
But in the past nine years Van Wyk has observed how the profile of these dust storms has intensified: they are now occurring more often, blowing in stronger — and are no longer followed by life-giving rains.
“All this, and no rain,” mutters the tall, lanky 32-year-old as he gazes at the Richtersveld’s vast and now clear blue skies. “This is the thing that has been going on constantly since 2012, that we get these extreme dust storms and extreme weather events and no rain.”
Sandstorms are common in the
area, but mining contaminates the
dust, and the life-giving rains that
used to follow are becoming rarer. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
These desert plants have been stable for thousands of years, their fragile existence “insanely highly adapted” to heat and drought. To save water, numerous species don’t produce leaves and photosynthesise through their stems, while some exist almost entirely underground or grow fine hairs to catch dew drops. Other highly specialised succulent species comb moisture from coastal fog that rolls in from the cold Atlantic Ocean.
“So this [change] is quite sudden,” Van Wyk says. “We’re losing an insane amount of things. I don’t want to know what damage this wind has done in the mountains, especially to the quiver trees — the number that would be blown over — and they’re already so stressed from the drought.”
Last year, a strong wind event knocked over hundreds of sturdy botterbome — fat-stemmed bonsai-like succulent trees that bulge from the region’s sand and gravel plains.
“We don’t even know what their ages are,” says Van Wyk.
Self-taught
botanist Pieter van Wyk.
The landscape is dry, hot and unforgiving, but a spectacular diversity of flora clings to life here. On a surface area of one square kilometre, more than 360 flowering plant species have been found.
The Richtersveld is South Africa’s driest national park, but its botanical diversity is rivalled only by the Cape Floral Region. “This place is crazy sensitive … because of the long lifespan of species here. It’s a freak place,” he says.
“The only way to really understand it is to spend a lifetime here to see what is going on … For the majority of life here the way of surviving and it must have been like this for a long time, is by living as long as possible,” he says, describing how some seeds can live in the soil for 100 years, waiting for rain.
Its unique vegetation lies within the Succulent Karoo biome (a global biodiversity hotspot), the desert biome and the Nama Karoo biome while its geology is rich and ancient. It is the only national park located in the summer and winter rainfall belt in a narrow transition zone. About 30% of the total floristic composition occurs nowhere else.
The Pearson’s aloes last flowered in
2017, and are among 400 species
under threat.
But more and more, the destructive fingerprints of climate change are clawing everywhere.
“In Sendelingsdrift, at least we got 120mm of rain from 1991 every year until 2012, when it got lower and lower. By 2014, we received 12mm or 13mm. In 2017, we received only 1.2mm for the whole year,” Van Wyk says, noting how the winter of 2017 was the warmest on record with the lowest rainfall. “Everything went completely south. The plants couldn’t cope.”
In the low, undulating hills of Helskloof, more than a million iconic Pearson’s aloes turned this mountain pass into a “magical canvas” of red, yellow and orange annually, when they flowered from December to February.
But now Helskloof is a bleak floral graveyard, where huge stretches of the aloes have perished, becoming shrivelled, withered husks. Van Wyk estimates that these distinctive aloes are between 200 and 400 years old.
A scientific paper to be published by Van Wyk and colleagues shows how its population has shrunk by more than 60% because of one of the most devastating droughts on record. They last flowered in 2017.
Succulents rescued from mining and
poaching activities find a home in Pieter van Wyk’s nursery.
“It was a huge spectacle to see millions of them in flower, which we will never see again in our few lifetimes because they are dead,” says Van Wyk, adding that the surviving plants are under immense stress.
The paper describes how the species is a good indicator of the impact the changing climate can have on localised endemic species. Should climatic conditions remain unfavourable over the next two to five years, the species “could easily go extinct by 2030”.
“It’s just one species out of 400 species going through exactly the same thing,” says Van Wyk. “The only difference is that it’s an iconic species because it’s got that value to the South African National Parks (Sanparks) as it’s a huge tourist attraction when they flower, which is out of season for the whole region.”
The same grim fate is befalling the halfmens, a strange, tree-like succulent plant species devoid of branches which is the most iconic of the Richtersveld.
“We are losing all our halfmens. It’s only on the high mountains and the highest slopes you get them now. Like most large succulents, they also died on the lower foot slopes, which have simply become too warm for them. My guess is more than 80% are dead,” Van Wyk says, adding that quiver trees, too, are dying out in large numbers.
“Giant quiver trees have an average lifespan of 400 years, so it means there are ones way older than that that are dying. We’re starting to see shepherd trees dying and we have several that are older than 1 000 years …
“These species have been living relatively okay for a long time – again it’s been desert with the harshness and the elements of the desert – but it was not above what they could cope with. They can’t cope anymore.”
More than a third of the days in the year already have daytime temperatures in excess of 35 °C. On some days late last month, it was still 35°C in Sendelingsdrift, he says.
“The day temperatures are way above normal — it should be on average 26°C for the winter period. We’ve had years during this drought where the average temperature for winter is 30°C. We haven’t received any winter rainfall so far this year.”
A quiver tree is battling to survive.
A 2021 Sanparks climate change and vulnerability assessment for the Richtersveld details how the average maximum temperature has already climbed by more than 1°C in the region. The area is expected to become much hotter, with less rain over the coming decades, although there is a possibility that coastal fog may increase.
Predictions of future climate change include further increases in annual average temperature of between 1.4°C and 2.4°C by 2050, which will result in “unbearably hot temperatures” throughout significant portions of the year. More recent models predict changes of up to 3°C by 2050, with as many as 75 more days per year above 35°C, with changes of up to 3.9°C by the end of the century.
“Nothing will survive those temperatures,” says Van Wyk, as he deftly hand-rolls a cigarette. “We’re going to end up with a desert like the Sahara here.”
The report says there is anecdotal evidence that damaging sand storms are increasing in intensity within the park, “with the potential to remove topsoil, seed banks and further exacerbate the effects of drought”.
Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests large-scale population decline of many iconic species during the current drought, even those considered of least concern to date, it says.
Since 2014, hundreds of Richtersveld species have been listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List because of climate change, poaching, overgrazing and mining.
At the nursery, Claudia Cloete tends to confiscated plants.
“I don’t want to lose my head but what we are seeing now, it’s horrible. For most of my life everything was fine. Now, everything is suffering immensely, from the Nama livestock farmers, to the animals, the insects and the birds.
“When this drought started, one of the first things we noticed was our reptile population started to collapse, then our rodent population and then our raptors moved away. One thing after another started to fall apart.”
Described as a “guru of the Richtersveld”, Van Wyk has already discovered 26 new plant species — the latest a rare flower for which he had searched for 21 years. “Even with stuff dying out in this drought, new stuff is constantly being discovered,” he quips.
His love for the region, and its fragile, irreplaceable flora, is imprinted on his body. On one arm is a tattoo of the Greek name of a desert plant species he took part in describing, while a Protea fynbos species tattoo blooms on his neck.
As a child, Van Wyk grew up in the coastal dunes of Alexander Bay, documenting plants and animals to escape the “noise and chaos of people”.
By the age of 14, he was writing a guide to the plants of the Richtersveld.
“My grandmother knew the veld really well and taught me about edible and medicinal plants. Some of the old Nama shepherds taught me some of the old traditions around plants,” he explains.
Van Wyk tells how in recent years, poaching has soared, driven by the unprecedented demand for wild harvested succulent plant species in Europe and Asia, which is being fuelled by social media. “It’s catastrophic. It’s insane, the people who are involved, and the syndicates who are driving it.
“On individual targeted species, it’s bigger than rhino horn poaching but it’s succulents. We’ve already lost three species that went extinct from last year to now … and they were species of least concern.”
At the nursery, confiscated succulents sit in rows of containers, each carefully documented by police case numbers. They can never be returned to the wild.
Mining, targeted to certain geological formations on the alluvial plains of the Orange River, too, has had a “catastrophic” impact on plant biodiversity. “Unfortunately because of the geology, it’s rich in minerals and that’s why it’s been raided for so long by the mines.
“If you walk now out of Sendelingsdrift into the veld and you get a localised endemic – obviously they are not over the whole landscape, it’s minute little islands where they grow, the questions one should ask when you stand in front of it are: Why is it growing here? How long has it been there and how old are the plants you are looking at?
“With mining and any form of destruction, we don’t know that. You can’t rehabilitate in a place like this,” he says, adding how mining has not benefited the local Nama community, who have lived as semi-nomadic pastoralists in the desolate region for thousands of years.
“Even though we’re constantly telling the government that this is a super-sensitive place, that we are facing mass extinction, the mining is continuing. Then you’ve got the global climate problem, which is out of my hands.
“We can’t change the climate of the Richtersveld soon enough to prevent this mass extinction. If humans can stop this snowball effect, it’s anyway going to be too late for a place like this. I mean, this place is going through a period of mass extinction at the moment.”
Life in the Richtersveld — the people, the animals and the plants — follows its own slow rhythm, he says.
“This is one of the spots that absolutely must not be touched by humans …
“The thing is just now with the biodiversity loss in such a huge quantity, the gene bank that is left needs to be conserved as far as possible, because if there are good conditions again, life can bounce back.”
(John McCann/M&G)
‘The desert is spreading in the Richtersveld’
The wind stirs up clouds of dust as Kevin Domroch walks his line of goats along the rugged desert plains of the Richtersveld to get water for his livestock.
“I’ve seen the changes in nature here in the past five years,” says Domroch as he starts to dig out precious pools of water at an old pumping station. “The desert is growing all the time, you can see it. It’s becoming bigger.”
The 40-year-old lives within the Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, which is owned and managed by the Nama community, descendents of the Khoikhoi people, and inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2007.
“There’s more wind and when it blows, it covers the plants closed. We try to adapt to the changes, but we can do nothing,” he shrugs.
Domroch and his relatives used to keep 800 goats. Now, they have fewer than 200. “We had to sell them because of the drought. There was no grass and plants for them.”
In the isolated desert hamlet of !Khubus, which lies on the outskirts of the Richtersveld National Park, Abe Koopman, the line manager of the Richtersveld World Heritage Site, tells of the impacts of unfolding climate change. “The stock farmers are suffering because of this long drought. The underground water levels are declining.”
‘Too much heat’: !Khubus elder Gert Links says the climate has altered.
“The other thing is the extreme weather. People … can’t work when it is too hot in summer and they get dehydrated. Even schoolchildren are struggling and the school has to adapt its times in summer.”
Sandstorms, too, have become more frequent. “There’s more desertification. The desert is spreading further now,” he says.
!Khubus elder Gert Links agrees. “Things have changed a lot. It’s the lack of rain and too much heat. Some days we don’t have water.”
Paul Moos, 65, was also forced to stop livestock farming because of the crippling drought. “I am no longer a farmer, as I would love to be. Nature is changing. That’s the cause.”
A 2021 South African National Parks climate change vulnerability assessment notes how the small, dispersed human population of the region is highly vulnerable.
“The Richtersveld area is expected to become much hotter (as many as 75 more days per year above 35°C), with less rain over the coming decades … As a result, climate change is predicted to interact with other stressors such as degradation and overgrazing, which could result in rapid desertification,” it says.
Increasing sandstorms, from the combination of land degradation (exacerbated by hotter, drier conditions) and the increased potential for strong winds (from temperature differentials between land and sea) are further expected to compound problems.
In !Khubus, increased wind speeds have led to the loss of grazing that the community attributes to sand blown over vegetation and reduced recruitment potential.
“These conditions exacerbate the impact of grazing. Increased sand being blown across the landscape also drives the loss of natural springs that herders previously used,” the assessment says, adding that climate change will affect the makeup of this cultural landscape, as well as tourism and the ability to work outdoors.
“The Richtersveld municipality is among the most physically vulnerable in the country, because of the lack of connectedness between the settlements and general remoteness.”
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