Restoring Africa’s relationship with land will save water
Africa Month is an apt time to plan nature-based solutions to our eroded environment
GOING back to basics – when African citizens managed the landscapes through, for example, rotational grazing – is key if the continent is to achieve the long-term sustainability goals set by UN and AU.
We, Africans, have utilised resources and survived interactively with nature since time immemorial with the nomadic way of life, until we were divided by colonisation and, in many cases, set against each other as foreign nations and countries. The values attached by our ancestors to nature were slowly eroded with disempowerment and dispossession. We must continue reversing the impoverished legacy of Africa – and we can.
During the month of May, the continent and world celebrates Africa month, a time to reflect and tactically plan our future as Africans.
Africa Day (formerly African Freedom Day and African Liberation Day) is the annual commemoration of the foundation of the OAU (now known as the AU) on May 25, 1963. This attractive African landscape area is about 29million square kilometres, with an estimated 1.2 billion inhabitants.
Both the Sustainable Development Goals: 2030 and Africa agenda have very good aspirations – a better world where no one is left behind in the grinding poverty, inequality and conflict we experience daily. However, these ideals can only remain unattainable visions as long as we do not transform, care and love the nature that gives us livelihood.
These international transformation mechanisms highlight restoration, reversal of biodiversity losses in their targets as early as 2020 through 2030 to 2063, just to mention a few.
Studies show that Africa’s landscape is counted among the worst eroded, a serious threat to food security, prosperity and resilience in the changing climatic conditions. The global urbanisation rate is estimated at 70% before 2050. This change in settlements means carrying capacity of the landscape and its ability to provide ecosystem services (owing to degradation) will decrease at alarming rates affecting food production, business, causing natural habitats loss and biodiversity, poor water quality, increase of water-borne related diseases, species extinctions, expansion of alien invasive species, veld fire disasters and many more negative effects.
Fortunately, landscapes can be restored. However, costs escalate with the extent of degradation and the urgency at which citizen scientists, the private sector and government act in unity. Protecting landscapes or catchment areas is one of the key investment opportunities these Africans can do to heal our environment.
Beyond improved urban and rural water security, nature-based solutions provide multiple benefits for people and biodiversity – such as reducing flood risk, dam siltation, etc.
With peoples’ movements, African cities, (like others, globally) and their water utilities face a significant challenge – that of ensuring safe and sufficient supply of water within a context of great uncertainty.
Supplementing of grey infrastructure with greening of the catchments through restoration are critical for ensuring resilience in the face of drought and many other pressures.
The Nature Conservancy (2018) studied threats to landscape in 30 African cities in the SADC and found that 28 of these can improve water security by millions of cubic metres through reducing soil erosion, which leads to sedimentation of dams (lowering water quality and hiking purification costs) and nutrient loading of dams, lakes and rivers.
Going back to nature-based solutions is central and excessively cheap compared to other water security interventions, such as desalination and waste water re-use.
In South Africa, the Water Research Commission and partners are strengthening the prioritising of degraded catchment areas, and the costing of the greening needs, – such as restoration of the degraded natural ecosystems.
South Africa recently identified critical water resource areas from which more than 50% of our rainfall drains from. Unfortunately, most of them are under threat from the spread of highly thirsty alien invasive plants, besides unsustainable mining and agricultural activities, and the degradation of vegetation cover leading to bear and easily eroded soils. Most of these impacts are felt across the continent. Billions in investment are required to restore these degraded catchments. More resources will certainly be required to green up or create healthy ecological infrastructure across the country. While these resources may sound high, any further delays will only mean we incur more costs to achieve the same.
Returns on investment have also been estimated, though finer details are still under investigation. South African can certainly do better with further donor funding in addition to the assistance it receives from the Global Environmental Facility.
Private-sector support as well as committed citizen scientists are vital to restoration. The development of various methods to streamline naturebased solutions into policy and public participation are well under way.
The Water Research Commissionand the departments of Environment and Water, in partnership with the International Society for Ecological Restoration, are finalising the plans for an international conference focused on restoration as one of the tools for water security, resilient landscapes and communities in the light of the changing world characterised by frequent droughts in some areas and floods elsewhere, often highly disastrous.
Undoubtedly, this conference, from September 24-28 in Cape Town, comes at an opportune time when Africa and South Africa are experiencing these disasters and are in need of diverse expert views to ensure preparedness that will save lives and properties.
The ultimate goal of the conference (www.ser2019.org) is to establish a community of practise called Society for Ecological Restoration: African Chapter.
Of all the continents, Africa is the only one without this Chapter, despite being one of the worst-hit by uncertainties. This will change from September – and most of its impact will be felt in water security as a result of restoration interventions that the Chapter will open the way for.