CONSERVATION & ENVIRONMENT NEWS Australia buys back gum trees and improves SA’s water saving The first massive eucalyptus trees have been felled in the mid-Breede River area in a bold ‘value-adding chain’ project that will return seven million litres of water per hectare cleared per year to the river system, and will sell much of the gum tree wood back to Australia where it came from. The winwin-win project represents a collaboration between the Western Cape Department of Agriculture’s (WC DOA) LandCare Areawide Planning initiative, Inhlabathi Environmental Services, the farming community, private enterprise, and local SMMEs, which will benefit from training and development by Avocado Vision to ensure their sustainability and increased job creation. LandCare Areawide Planning is a comprehensive problem-solving process that integrates social, economic and ecological concerns over defined geographical areas to sustain environmental health through a natural resource management approach incorporating locally driven initiatives. Western Cape Minister of Agriculture, Dr Ivan Meyer, says, “At the heart of our commitment to sustainably manage our biodiversity lie partnerships with organisations such as Inhlabathi, Avocado Vision, the farming community and local SMMEs. Together we must ‘bend the curve’ of biodiversity loss and take steps to mitigate the negative impact of unsustainable farming practices and climate change on our biological diversity.” He adds that not protecting our ecological infrastructure will lead to the collapse of our natural ecosystem. “Higher pollution incidents and an increase in invasive alien plant (IAP) infestations will decrease the availability and quality of water, creating perfect conditions for soil erosion, land degradation and loss of biodiversity.” The removal of IAP species has been shown to be the least expensive and most effective means of avoiding another ‘Day Zero’ in Cape Town and surrounds. According to Louise Stafford, Director of Water Funds at The Nature Conservancy (TNC), research by TNC in 2019 showed that IAP removal was significantly the most cost-effective intervention, delivering the highest potential water saving. 174 responsible traveller
Water saving interventions and the potential water saving in the first six years: IAP removal in 7 priority sub-catchment areas - 55.6 billion litres; desalination - 55 billion litres; waste water re-use 39.2 billion litres and groundwater supplies 36.5 billion litres. The mid-Breede project is taking the removal of IAPs along 25km of the Bree River frontage near Bonnievale to a new level of adding value to biomass – and, with a hint of poetic justice – is selling much of the harvested eucalyptus wood to global markets that include Australia and Vietnam. Rudolph Röscher, LandCare District Manager in the Cape Winelands District, for the WC DOA, says, “In implementing the LandCare Areawide Plan and working together with the farming community, we identified the IAPs along this specific riparian zone as one of the primary causes of the natural resource decline. The farmers agreed that the healthy state of the river through alien clearing and active restoration should be their number one priority.” The WC DOA invested funds to complete a numeration study to calculate the volume of biomass within the floodplains of the river that pose a risk during flooding. Röscher adds, “We shared the findings with the farmers who shared it with Inhlabathi, which is heading the team that’s harvesting these IAPs. As a result, a potential saving of millions of rand of government funding has taken place due to private investment to harvest the wood, while also delivering benefits of water saving, land restoration, job creation and SMME development.” David Gardner, Director of Inhlabathi, says the first felling of the IAP trees in December represents an important milestone in the Western Cape’s sustainable water-saving journey. “This is the start of our virtuous cycle-based approach that incorporates 100% clearing of eucalyptus from river areas, ensuring that maximum value is extracted from the felled trees, and that a certified programme of aftercare is implemented to return the river ecosystem to its original state.” The Inhlabathi model is founded on the intense IAP clearing that has been taking
