Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Barbara Creecy.
Since 1994, South Africa’s environmental department has, broadly speaking, performed “reasonably well as a regulator” with the limited resources and capacity afforded to it.
“It has also in recent years under Minister [Barbara] Creecy been a champion of the Climate Change Bill and other measures to address the climate crisis,” said Robert Krause, the acting head of environmental justice at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies.
But he pointed out that the department’s “political clout is limited” as reflected in the mining regulatory system by which it determines the rules under the National Environmental Management Act (Nema) and associated Acts, but approvals and enforcement are left to the department of mineral resources and energy.
The department of forestry, fisheries and the environment is one “with far less environmental expertise, capacity and a conflicted mandate [as regulator and promoter of mining]”.
At the heart of the problem is a combination of the power of the mineral-industrial complex and the lack of an active public sector-led green development programme to create new sectors, build necessary infrastructure and create jobs on a mass scale, Krause said.
“In the absence of such a policy, [the] environment invariably gets pitted against ‘development’ — for example, mining — which has resonance in a context of the economic devastation of the majority and the environment gets accorded second place.”
Spokesperson Peter Mbelengwa said the department has undergone several changes since 1994, with the environment portfolio at various junctures being linked to water affairs, forestry and tourism before its reconfiguration to include forestry and fisheries in 2019.
Its key mandate is to ensure that citizens have an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being and to have the environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations.
To empower the government to implement the environmental management policy, key policies and legislation include Nema and its sectoral Acts, as well as the National Water Act, World Heritage Convention Act, National Climate Change Response Policy of 2011 and the National Waste Management Strategy of 2012, among others.
Kate Handley, the executive director of the Biodiversity Law Centre, said: “If one looks on the whole at how the department has fared since democracy, we saw a slew of really positive, really robust environmental legislation coming into effect between around 1998 and 2004 in response to an environmental right, which is an incredibly robust right.”
She pointed out that not all regions in the world have a constitutionally enshrined right to a healthy environment. And, in line with this right, there have been some positive strides the department has made in the context of biodiversity conservation.
“We’ve also seen recently the minister [Creecy] taking a really strong hand in developing biodiversity policy … we’re seeing a new policy coming into effect in the form of the new White Paper on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity in South Africa.”
This is a really encouraging policy, she said. “It addresses issues of transformation in the sector; the need to conserve more of South Africa’s biodiversity; ideas around access and benefit-sharing to biodiversity and genetic resources and I look forward to seeing how it will be implemented.”
In December last year, South Africa became a signatory to the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Among other targets, it outlines the goal of protecting 30% of land and 30% of the sea by 2030 — the 30×30 target, and supports the White Paper.
The country’s terrestrial conservation estate is at 16% and the marine conservation estate, including the economic exclusion zone, is at 15%, Mbelengwa said. Under the National Protected Areas Expansion Strategy, it aims to achieve 28% protection of its conservation estate by 2036.
Handley said the government has “phenomenal biodiversity opportunities and is hopefully going to take advantage of the opportunity to achieve targets like 30×30 and also, of Target 15, around increased disclosure for companies around their impacts and risks in relation to biodiversity”.
The department has to navigate a difficult space with the likes of Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe “being so vehemently against environmental considerations in the context of mining and oil and gas exploration”, she said.
“We’ve just seen a wave of resistance from the Mantashe camp around environmental authorisations seeking to uphold the environmental right and prevent ecological degradation.”
For Creecy, this has been a difficult line to walk. “But I think that sometimes, she has just got it plain wrong. And we’ve seen some very concerning decisions coming out of the department in recent months, particularly this Karpowership environmental authorisation granted for Richards Bay and significant deficiencies in that environmental authorisation principally relating to a very weird biodiversity offset arrangement.”
The department’s budgetary allocations are significantly less than many other government departments and “just in terms of capacity to enforce a mandate, it’s on the backfoot to a certain extent”.
In a developmental state such as South Africa, there’s a difficult balancing act between developments that create socio-economic opportunities and the environment, but Handley said this is “a false dichotomy” in a sense because the environment underpins everything.
Fundamentally, there should be a greater deal of concern about detrimental development in the longer-term and in terms of the “bigger picture”.
Mbelengwa said that South Africa, through the department, has been at the forefront of the development of the transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) or peace parks. “We currently have six TFCAs and discussions have been initiated for an additional two TFCAs,” Mbelengwa said, adding that to date, TFCAs cover 65 500 hectares of land.
In addition, the country’s natural heritage encompasses nine world heritage sites, 25 marine protected areas, 21 national parks, two special nature reserves, 10 biosphere reserves, 51 forest nature reserves, 12 forest wilderness Areas, 17 mountain catchment areas, 26 protected environments and 1 332 nature reserves.
“One of the key initiatives to improve the protection and management of wetlands is the development and implementation of the National Wetland Management Framework and the identification and designation of wetlands of international importance or Ramsar Sites, which are sites of global importance which provide habitat to rare and endangered waterbirds.
South Africa has 29 Ramsar Sites, with 17 of them internationally recognised from 1997 to 2023. “These protected and conservation areas have positioned the country as a tourist destination of choice.”
The country’s biodiversity has been identified as the cornerstone for economic growth and sustainable development, said Mbelengwa, citing the importance of the Biodiversity Economy Strategy and its related Game Meat Strategy.
“Through the Biodiversity Economy Strategy, emphasis is placed on the wildlife, bioprospecting and tourism sectors with the aim of reducing poverty by developing and capitalising on the country’s natural resources through sustainable utilisation and the conservation of species.”
A key development has been the finalisation and implementation of the White Paper on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity. This overarching policy guides how the country conserves, sustainably uses nature and ensures access and benefits are shared equitably from the use of biodiversity and its components.
Creecy has been “good in addressing procedures”, said conservation specialist Karen Trendler. “So, if she’s been challenged and the department has been challenged over the years on not following process, procedure and public participation … she really has made an effort to address all of that and to bring welfare and well-being [of wildlife] into the picture.”
Overall, the biggest problem, according to Trendler, is that the fragmentation of legislation between the national and provincial departments with concurrent competencies often leads to contradictions in the application of the law and delays in implementation. “You have good policies at the top, but the provinces either don’t implement them or follow through.”
Richard York, the chief executive of Wildlife Ranching South Africa, said: “In all honesty, I think we’re failing the sustainable use part of the industry quite horribly. Many years ago when I was growing up, we were the only country in the world where you could hunt the Big Five and all species in South Africa were truly and well-secured.”
But now, because the department “can’t even administer a quota allocation, we can’t even utilise our natural resources that belong to us that we look after”.
There is “paralysis through analysis”, according to York. “We’ve got all these documents and policies and all objectives, but you can’t even implement a basic thing such as a national quota. They [the department] haven’t got the capacity, the budgets and the administrative skill on the ground.”
In the wildlife sector, the biggest problem is that the wildlife sector has grown astronomically — “we’ve got 9 000 registered game farms and 700 mixed game farms — but where is the manpower to service that industry? It isn’t there from the department,” said York.
“Just for the Big Five, we’ve got the High Level Panel report; we’ve got norms and standards for leopards … rhino … elephants, we’ve got management plans, biodiversity management plans and we’ve now got a heritage strategy. But 75% of our elephants outside of protected areas are on contraceptives.”
He questioned this logic. “Either a species is endangered so you need to protect the species or there’s too many and you need to allow the sustainable use thereof.”