Cleaning and greening provincial capitals, tackling South Africa’s overflowing waste problem in municipalities and helping them prepare for extreme weather shocks — while boosting jobs, tourism and biodiversity — are among the priorities of the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment (DFFE) in the year ahead.
DFFE minister Barbara Creecy said in an interview with TimesLIVE Premium ahead of her budget vote on Friday: “South Africa is a mega-biodiverse country, and what that means is we will have the full spread of climate-change impacts.
“We are going to have increasing flooding in the eastern parts of the country, we're going to have increasing drought in the western and southern parts of the country and heatwaves in the northern part of the country, and we will have storm surges and sea-level rise in our coastal areas.
“If you look at most countries in the world, they only have one of those impacts ... but we've got everything and responses [need to] be local.”
The department is assisting 44 district municipalities to develop climate change plans and supporting provinces to align their plans with the Climate Change Bill, tabled in parliament in February.
“Government is clear that we must battle both load-shedding and climate change. It is not a one or the other decision,” said the minister, assuring South Africans that decommissioning of ageing coal-fired power stations will not further compromise energy security.
“When I came into the department, the climate work was stuck. The climate bill had been in Nedlac for the last four years and the climate commission had not been set up,” Creecy said.
“Now the Climate Change Bill is being finalised in the National Assembly and ... a whole pipeline of interventions related to climate” are moving forward.
The cabinet has adopted the framework for South Africa’s “just energy transition” — from a fossil fuel-driven economy towards one fuelled by renewable energy, in line with its global commitment to reduce emissions — and the JET investment plan to drive this transition is under discussion.
Another step towards a greener economy is the drive to improve waste management and expand recycling. The department will use 18,000 Expanded Public Works jobs to assist in cleaning up streets and illegal dumps, planting trees and promoting recycling, Creecy said.
To demonstrate its investment in waste management, she reeled out numbers: R168m spent on the yellow waste collection fleet to assist 58 municipalities in the past two years; 1,5-million tonnes of paper and packing, and 19,000 tonnes of e-waste, diverted from landfill to recycling over this time; and R300m in financial support for 56 start-ups in the waste sector, creating 1,559 jobs; and 32 waste enterprises coming on board for recycling.
Jobs in tourism depend on protecting South Africa’s unique biodiversity and the sector provided 418,000 jobs when Creecy was appointed minister in 2019.
“We had hoped that we would significantly expand those jobs and then we had Covid-19, and a large portion of the jobs are in tourism,” she said. SANParks revenue reflects a significant recovery in the 2022 financial year from the pandemic drop, though international tourism had not yet “fully recovered”.
“South Africa is one of the top three biodiverse countries in the world along with Indonesia and Brazil”
— DFFE minister Barbara Creecy
SANParks aims to launch “39 new tourism products” in the next three years in partnership with the private sector, with 14 of them opening this year, Creecy said. These programmes will create 2,209 direct jobs to the value of R75m a year.
Visiting the communities bordering on parks, the minister said she was struck by how important tourism is to their “cash income opportunities” and the work that programmes like the removal of alien invasives offers them.
“Unless communities benefit from being adjacent to protected areas, they have no interest in helping us to protect wildlife and prevent poaching.,” she said, explaining why transformation was important in the recently adopted White Paper on Conservation and Sustainable Use of South Africa’s Biodiversity.
Creecy said she was very passionate about another work programme set up for scientists, to help retain them in South Africa. The “Groen Sebenza” programme offers 1,170 science graduates work as interns for two years.
She said a “frightening number” of scientific posts are not filled in provinces because of tight budgets, under which health and education needs trump those of conservation.
Yet scientists have a vital role to play in protecting ecosystems and upholding the standards for conservation, said Creecy.
In December South Africa committed to a global biodiversity agreement, at the heart of which was protecting 30% of the world’s land, oceans and waters by 2030.
By 2036 South Africa will have 28% of its land and 10% of its ocean under conservation, said Creecy. “We are likely to achieve the global 30 by 30 targets by the early 2040s.
“We have enough land under private game ranching that tomorrow morning, on land, we could meet our 30 x 30 target if we said every game ranch was a conservation area,” she said.
“But when we talk about the preservation of ecosystems what does it mean? Does it mean you can dam up your rivers because you want to make sure your plains game always have water ... all of those decisions have impacts on ecosystems and you can’t make subjective determinations.”
That’s where scientists are needed. The minister said too that public-private partnerships expanding protecting areas were essential in achieving its 30x30 targets.
Taking aim at the cruel and harmful practice of captive lion breeding, Creecy made clear that this its days are numbered.
Participants who wished to register to “voluntarily exit the captive lion industry” were given 60 more days, after the first public call to exit in April, she said. The task team on this has engaged vulnerable workers and all parties.
On the protection of wildlife, Creecy said the cabinet last week adopted the National Integrated Strategy to Combat Wildlife Crime and has a draft strategy and action plan to combat abalone poaching.
The department will support Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, where rhino poaching has escalated, in combating poaching through measures like spending R40m on the boundary fencing, she said.
The SA National Biodiversity Institute has incorporated the National Zoological Gardens in Tshwane and its facilities will be upgraded and the zoo modernised, Creecy announced.
The National Zoological Gardens plays an important role in combating the illegal wildlife trade through services like its Biobank, genetic services and forensic services units.
“I’m very conscious of the fact that you can’t do [conservation] alone. It’s teamwork. When you do it alone you run the risk that when you are no longer there, nobody else will do it,” Creecy told parliament, quoting Noble Laureate Wangari Maathai from Kenya.
When asked about her achievements over the past four years, Creecy replied: “I’m still busy.”
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