Call for invasive alien plant control plan

THE Southern Cape Landowners Initiative (SCLI) has encouraged landowners to draw up an invasive alien plant control plan to systematically deal with the water guzzlers.

This is as a first step towards better managing land, and to get in line with legislation governing land management.

Cobus Meiring of the SCLI said with much national focus on the very real energy crises, it was easy to forget that the country faced an even more dire situation in terms of the supply of fresh water to a fast-growing nation.

According to Meiring, the lack of available fresh water in towns such as Beaufort West and Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) has reached epic proportions.

“Drought, compounded by a complete lack of, or simply plain bad, management practices on all municipal levels, including an acute and growing lack of hard and technical skills within government structures, makes for a horror story likely to repeat itself more and more often as political forces and irrational policies continue to contribute to the collapse of public and natural infrastructure management,” Meiring said.

“Human suffering as a result of too little available fresh water is always immediately evident, but what is less focused on is what happens to our environment when infrastructure fails, the climate changes and less water of a too low quality flows down our rivers and into our wetlands, estuaries and ultimately the ocean,” he added.

As much as nature can be quick to recover, resilient and forgiving, it is fragile and reaches a point of no return to stability, where it is no longer able to deliver some of its critical services such as the promotion of valuable biodiversity and the supply of clean fresh water.

“Over-extraction of water from catchments in times of drought and allowing our catchments and rivers to be totally overgrown with invasive alien plants all contribute to natural systems that underperform, often with disastrous effects,” Meiring said.

On the Garden Route, fresh water supply to estuaries such as the Klein and Groot Brak was increasingly deteriorating, leading to a reduction of Indian Ocean fish stocks and associated food chain deterioration, he said.

For more information landowners can visit the SCLI website: www. scli.org.za/problems-invasive-alienplants-draw-plan/ or www.scli.org.za/ category/iap-eradication/