In a nutshell, the South Africa Environment Outlook report warns that the environment is deteriorating while poor people still face unemployment and poverty and the rich ensure that their impact on natural resources is higher than the global average.
The assessment is not new. These imbalances have previously been highlighted by environmental organisations, which openly criticise the race for material wealth at the expense of water availability and quality, livelihood security and biodiversity.
“Consumptive patterns are unsustainable, but it seems the general political and social climate in South Africa is instead supporting a ‘get rich at all costs’ approach rather than focusing on the long-term impacts of today’s actions,” stated various NGOs in a collective response to the report.
The conservation director of the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa, Bryan Haveman, said the scientific studies presented in the Environment Outlook “are actually quite frightening. The bottom line is that water is the cross-cutting theme, especially with the added threat of climate change. What worries us is that there appears to be no sense of urgency to do something about it.”
The NGOs pointed out the government’s accelerated and shared growth initiative (Asgisa) plans to achieve economic growth of at least 5% between now and 2009, while reducing by half inequality and poverty by 2014. Asgisa plans, however, reveal a dearth of environmental controls and parameters.
“If the national development agenda, exemplified by Asgisa, remains based on a complete lack of attention to our very serious environmental constraints, as exposed by the Environment Outlook, and continues to promote a growth path that is unsustainable in the long run, the environmental legislation and frameworks will never be implemented as they present any number of ‘inconvenient truths’,” said the NGOs.
The executive director of the Wilderness Foundation of South Africa, Andrew Muir, explained that the current economic growth rate is exceeding the national natural resource base. “We have to look seriously at renewable resources, particularly energy and water use, where input and output equal minimal environmental costs,” Muir said.
Added John Dini, of the South African National Biodiversity Institute’s Working for Wetlands programme: “We can’t invent water and something has got to change. The engineering field has to change its mindset because we know that supply will be less than demand in a few years’ time, which has huge implications for biodiversity.”
Rob Little, acting CEO of the World Wide Fund for Nature, also expressed concern about water resources. “It is about demand management — we have to deal, firstly, with wastage of water and, secondly, with unregulated and irresponsible use of water by agriculture,” he said. “We know that agriculture uses 60% to 70% of our water and there are huge chunks being used that are not being accounted for.”
Little described the term “sustainable development” as an oxymoron. “As humans, we know that development cannot be sustainable but that there are ways of doing things — of making sure that progress is less impactful on the environment. Everyone shies away from population numbers, but this features strongly in our Living Planet Report as a huge threat to the environment.”
According to the 2006 Living Planet Report, people globally have been livng beyond their means since the late 1980s. The global ecological impact is about 25% greater than the Earth’s ability to regenerate.
Belinda Reyers, who heads up the biodiversity research group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, said at least the Environment Outlook showed that people are linking livelihoods with environmental conservation. “I have feelings of optimism as South Africa is one of the first countries to implement a national spatial biodiversity assessment and we have some of the most advanced environmental policies in the world in line with our Constitution,” she said.