Garden Route dwellers’ future at stake
Environmental factors indicate a high-risk future for the Garden Route population, say experts.
Population growth, diminishing water resources, increases in invasive alien plant growth patterns, fire risks, climate change and coastal and interior land degradation are significant factors, according to Cobus Meiring of the Southern Cape Landowners Initiative (SCLI).
Environmental degradation
Meiring highlights the harsh realities of environmental degradation after he attended a scenario-plotting exercise involving senior environmentalists and government officials in Knysna recently.
“In many respects, the 2017 Knysna inferno served as a wake-up call to the region’s residents, and all indications are that, if unmanaged, the Garden Route is on a fast track towards harm, potentially very negatively affecting those who choose to live there,” warns Meiring.
Future scenario
The environmental workstream chairperson for the Garden Route Rebuild Initiative, Japie Buckle, who is from the Department of Environmental Affairs, invited Brentonbased environmental scenario planner and director of resource economics at FutureWorks Consulting, Myles Manders, to lead a scenario-plotting exercise, involving senior environmentalists and government officials in Knysna.
To determine where the Garden Route might be in 20 years from now, the present state of the environment is used as a point of departure.
Present state the starting point
This includes factors that can realistically be managed, such as the built environment, and those that cannot, e.g. rainfall and climate change, which are then used to determine and plot a progressive trajectory.
Factored into the equation are the most significant issues that have a bearing on the environment, including increased population, diminishing water resources, increases in invasive alien plant growth patterns, fire risks, climate change and coastal and interior land degradation.
Garden Route residents at risk
The factors bearing down on the environment are significant and too complex to delve into individually, but the collective outcome is very clear: the Garden Route is fast approaching a point where it can no longer viably support those who choose to live there, and is, at the same time, putting them at risk.
No doubt those charged with managing the City of Cape Town and the greater Western Cape decades ago must have used various scenario trajections to inform the way they plan for the future. However, even if they did, they were caught off guard by the severity of the present drought, the very real chance of it repeating itself, and the unabated increase in the population dependent on it.
Climate change pinch
In a worldwide phenomenon, populations are gravitating towards mega metropolitan/ urban areas, while the rural areas become vacant. The Western Cape interior is feeling the pinch of climate change, and the barren land is in many instances no longer able to support farming communities, forcing them to move to urbanised/better-resourced areas.
The Garden Route, stretching essentially from George to Plettenberg Bay, is experiencing an exponential increase in population. However, those moving here may well wake up to the harsh reality that, within a very short timeframe, the natural environment they chose to live in can anything but sustain them and, instead, will leave them in harms’ way.
Increasing fire risk
Already Sedgefield/Knysna, Oudtshoorn and Plettenberg Bay suffer from perpetual water shortages, with no way of augmentation and additional storage capacity. Severe encroachment of invasive alien plants, both in the landscape and mountains, pose an increasingly high fire risk, exacerbated by drier conditions and stronger/dryer winds.
A fast-changing climate indicates more episodic rainstorms which, coupled with rising sea levels, will unavoidably bring more floods and coastal erosion, destroying and damaging bulk infrastructure and property.
Changing the way we think/plan
Authorities, inhabitants, landowners and land managers will do well to adapt the way they think and plan. In the very short term, rationality and economic forces should strongly consider human relocation away from vulnerable areas (such as the Garden Route) to regions in South Africa that are more suitable and resourced for the longterm survival and prosperity of our fasturbanising population.
Using environmental planning as a baseline and identifying sites suitable for the development of new megacities may well be an option for consideration in South Africa’s future development.
Seminar coming up
A high-level Environmental Restoration Seminar will be held 6 to 8 June in Knysna to commemorate and reflect on all matters pertaining to the rehabilitation of Knysna and the surrounds post-fire, and planning ahead. Water security, fire and associated risks and biodiversity conservation are high on the agenda. The seminar is a collaborative effort to involve all relevant regional, provincial and national role players.
Find out more
SCLI is a public platform for landowners and land managers with an interest in the control and eradication of invasive alien plants. More info: www.scli. org.za.