We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. What is causing this devastation in the Western Cape and how do we stop and reverse a process that threatens the global web of life?
It is now widely recognized that synergies between climate change and biodiversity conservation mean that the two agendas must be pursued concurrently to meet societal and environmental goals, such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Targets, and the Paris Agreement. This recognition is now also reflected in global social movements aimed at driving political action.
Paradise …
If you’re a layperson keen on learning something of conservation, you’ll have read a variation of the following five or six paragraphs so many times you’re probably able to recite your own version of them. Nonetheless, the information they contain bears repeating. So, here we go.
The Western Cape contains, mostly within its boundaries, the smallest of the world’s six plant kingdoms. The Cape Floral Kingdom, or Cape Floristic Region, covers less than 6% of South Africa’s surface and less than 0.5% of Africa’s. Yet, as home to some 20% of Africa’s flora, we host an extraordinarily diverse 9 000-plus vascular species in five biomes; Forest, Nama Karoo, Succulent Karoo, Thicket and Fynbos, the last of which has always been, by far, the largest.
Some 6 200 or 69% of these species are endemic, i.e. they grow nowhere else.
The Cape Floristic Region follows and lies west and south of the L-shaped Cape Fold Belt (CFB) mountains. All to the north, from the Northern Cape to the fringes of the Mediterranean Sea, across the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, South East Asia and the Indo Pacific, is taken up by our neighbouring Palaeotropical Plant Kingdom.
In an area less than that covered by the second-smallest state in Australia, Victoria (which falls into the Australian Plant Kingdom), we in the Western Cape host – by area – the most biodiverse plant kingdom on Earth.
Our proteoids, ericoids, restioids, geophytes and renosterveld are divided into many dozens of types generally based on or, more accurately, constrained by climate, topography and soil type – meaning each vegetation type, for example, Cape Flats Sand Fynbos, is made up of hundreds of species all of which are crammed into incredibly rich but small habitats.
And this amazingly bounteous and biodiverse plant kingdom does not exist in isolation. It’s part of an equally rich gene pool making up, with fauna, fungi, bacteria and other life forms, the ecologies on which all life depends. Without this ecological biodiversity, the constituents and ecological webs of life as we know it would unravel, collapse and die off – extremely swiftly.
Perhaps many of us take these facts for granted, but I still get a kick out of them. Look at it this way. Were we Capetonians to be transported back 5 000 years with no means of leaving what is undoubtedly one of the world’s most beautiful locales, we’d be surrounded by all the life and variety we need to sustain ourselves – and much, much more.
Okay, we’d be sharing the place with hippo, lion and other creatures that make weird and disturbing noises at night but, no matter how you view it, we’d still be living in Paradise. We’d be blissfully unaware that, just across yonder blue mountains, the Northern Cape holds its own allure. Cape Town would be the world, the world would provide and life would be good.
… lost?
Thing is, we don’t live 5 000 years, or even 500 years, ago. We live today. And, if we look at any maps on SANBI’s BGIS 2014 land cover map, we can literally see our biodiversity disappearing before our eyes.
Like a spider high on LSD, we have spun a web of destruction across our national landscape, destroying all that gets in our way. We are destroying what little remains of our uniquely biodiverse Fynbos Biome through our:
• introduction of invasive alien species to the Wildland Urban Interface
• harvesting of Fynbos in the formal and informal cut-flower, medicinal and agricultural industries
• pollution of water, land and/or air
• disruption of species dynamics through the decimation of pollinators or dispersers – including long-tongued flies, butterflies and hopliine (scarab or monkey) beetles
• giving some species competitive advantage over others
• aggravation of damage caused by droughts and floods – by way of cutting paths and clearings, informal land transformation and indulging destructive leisure activities
• inadequate response to climate change
• development of infrastructure, crop cultivation, forestry plantations and mines, and…
• abuse and misuse of fire.
These factors and behaviours cause or contribute to Fynbos habitat disturbance, habitat degradation and, ultimately, habitat loss. In the modern idiom, it’s a bloody train smash, the severity of which can be ascertained by a glance at the provincial government’s CapeFarmMapper.
If we now look at the Fynbos biome on SANBI’s National Vegetation Map, we have to ask ourselves, as one life form among many others, “What the hell have we done – and what the hell do we think we’re continuing to do?”
A little more than a century or two ago (a nanosecond, or no time at all, in geological time), Fynbos covered the Western Cape (the colour purple). Coexisting with other biomes, it was all over the place. Today, and referring back to our BGIS 2014 land cover map, it has (and this is no overstatement) all but disappeared – thereby making its restoration and conservation, in what some so lovingly refer to as “the progressive Anthropocene”, our greatest and most pressing need.
That’s putting it politely. Even without the benefit of SANBI’s maps where we can see, quite clearly, our rapidly-burgeoning, increasingly urbanised population supported by agricultural and mining sectors taking up way more space than we do (a global phenomenon), it’s what’s known as a wicked problem.
It’s not just that our towns and cities have led us to pave over our Fynbos. Bringing food and goods to our people has led us to slice, dice and crisscross the Western Cape with our transport (road and rail) networks to such an extent that no Fynbos habitat has been left untouched. Most (and, yes, that means most) of it is now covered or obliterated by highly-cultivated commercial farmlands and, with an ever-increasing population fed by an agribusiness economy driven by increasing growth and profit, our Fynbos is on to a proverbial hiding to nothing.
And, by nothing, I mean nothing. It’s being beaten to hell and gone.
Announcing its plans for our national future, the Department of Agriculture told us in 2007:
Land used for agriculture comprises 81% of the country’s total area, while natural areas account for about 9%. Approximately 83% of agricultural land in South Africa is used for grazing, while 17% is cultivated for cash crops. Forestry comprises less than 2% of the land and approximately 12% is reserved for conservation purposes.
It’s worse in the Western Cape. In 2013, a provincial goverment report, Western Cape Provincial Profile: Emphasis on agricultural sector, put figures to our province. Of the 12.94 million hectares making up the province, 11.56 million hectares (or 89.3% of the land) is farmland, also used chiefly for grazing.
And just 5.6% of the province is earmarked for “nature conservation”.
If these figures speak to our land-use priorities, what chance a sustainable future for our uniquely biodiverse plant kingdom which, not by chance, is also a biodiversity hotspot for animal life? The pollution, chemical nutrients and pesticides, as well as the mismanagement of our hydrological resources resulting from our habit of feeding ourselves by way of a capitalist economy based on infinite growth and endless consumption is literally killing life on Earth.
We are destroying the floral and faunal biodiversity that sustains us.
To say nothing of our increasingly-evident global Climate Crisis.
A Hell of Our Making
Do we believe David Wallace-Wells’s New York Post article, The Uninhabitable Earth, to be over the top? No. Do we feel Nathaniel Rich, in his 35 000-word New York Times article, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, is overly pessimistic? No. Do we feel Johathan Frantzen deserves a roasting for his New Yorker article, What If We Stopped Pretending? No. Do we believe Steffen et al to be incorrect in asserting in their “Hothouse Earth” paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, that we might cross thresholds resulting in runaway climate change? No.
The science and consensus on the science of climate change are not up for debate. The facts are in and the predictions are anything but optimistic. Our children know as much.
But that is, perhaps, beside the point. The point is that Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) and the resulting climate crisis that might well finish us (and myriad other species) off in no time at all are as much consequences of biodiversity as they are a result of our destruction of it.
Think about it. Through evolution, natural selection and what have you, biodiversity gave rise to life as we know it – including our species, the last of the hominids. And we, through our short-sighted pursuit of this, that and the next thing immediately set about destroying that biodiversity through, among other things, our heavy addiction to fossil fuels and other harmful substances.
We are biodiversity at war with itself.
We are more than aware of (and clued up on) the real and immediate existential threat posed by the climate emergency. In fact, any meaningful consideration of biodiversity and the points in the above bulleted list should tell us that climate change is merely one of the problems we’ve brought on ourselves and all other species through our delinquent behaviour – extremely well illustrated in the following diagram accompanying the recent IPBES report, Summary for Policymakers of the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
The above graphic (with human Values and behaviors to the left degrading and destroying Terrestrial, Freshwater and Marine ecosystems as elucidated to the right) articulates, in scientific terms, the assertion illustrated by Eric Nathan’s iconic image at the top of this entry. We are wholly responsible for the destruction of our ecosystems and biodiversity.
Back to Basics
Knowing this to be so, we must ask why we in the Western Cape are losing biodiversity at a faster rate than other province and, indeed, countries or continents. Part of the answer is to be found in the small habitat spaces afforded Fynbos species in the Mediterranean latitudes south and west of the Cape Fold Belt.
And this is where things get really interesting, if only because life is a state of being we share with other species. According to the likes of Curtis Marean, Christopher Henshilwood and John S Compton, the Western Cape (at Mossel Bay’s Pinnacle Point and nearby sites, e.g. Blombos Cave and others) is the site where Homo sapiens, through exposure to a seafood diet, first used or put abstract thought to practical use – also, and like Fynbos – when restricted to a constrained habitat.
The evolution of all our species intrigues me and, yes, genes have much to do with that process. As a layperson, my favourite piece on the subject, because it’s eminently readable, is John Compton’s 2011 paper in Quaternary Science Reviews, Pleistocene sea-level fluctuations and human evolution on the southern coastal plain of South Africa.
This, from the abstract:
The [Southern Coastal Plain (SCP)] expands five-fold as sea level falls from 75 to 120 m during glacial maxima to form a continuous, unobstructed coastal plain accessible to the interior. An expanded and wet glacial SCP may have served as a refuge to humans and large migratory herds and resulted in the mixing of previously isolated groups. The expansive glacial SCP habitat abruptly contracts, by as much as one-third in 300 yr, during the rapid rise in sea level associated with glacial terminations. Rapid flooding may have increased population density and competition on the SCP to select for humans who expanded their diet to include marine resources or hunted large animals.
Compton’s hypothesis, i.e. that humans experienced a great evolutionary leap following their transition to a seafood diet following a sea-level rise of some 120 metres following the last glacial maximum some 140 ka would have seen the SCP contract by 15-50 km at its narrowest points. Vast tracts of perhaps Sand Fynbos, Strandveld, Limestone Fynbos, Dune Strandveld, Shale Renosterveld, Thicket and Grassland might have been reclaimed by the rising sea and, as with humans and other animals, so with the flora.
In short, our great evolutionary leap as a species (this was well before we decided to move to the Southern Suburbs, emigrate to the four corners of the Earth and, eventually, destroy everything) was shaped by the same natural forces that pushed Fynbos into smaller and smaller habitats.
Refugia were to be found in the steeply-graded topography of the Cape Fold Belt where countless millennia subject to changing climate must have forced Fynbos species to evolve and multiply in these smaller habitat units.
We humans, as invasive a species as any, now “use” some 90% of that habitat space to meet our immediate needs.
Research by scientists in every sphere clearly shows the global scientific community to be deeply invested in our peculiar biodiversity and the many above-mentioned reasons for it. It tells us why we have such biodiversity and, most importantly, through SANBI’s BGIS portal, it shows us how we’re so swiftly obliterating it.
So, besides calling for the transformation of our economies, no more “business as usual” and the like, how do we preserve what little is left?
We certainly won’t get anywhere by blaming government. Environmental Affairs’ Register of Protected Areas shows that government has gone some way to protecting slivers of our Fynbos Biome.
Because the Cape Floristic Region meets criteria set by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention adopted in Paris on 16 November 1972 and ratified by South Africa on 10 July 1997, eight protected but noncontiguous Fynbos areas covering 553 000 hectares – collectively called the Cape Floral Region Protected Areas – were declared a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site in 2004. On 3 July 2015, UNESCO almost doubled the Cape Floral Region Protected Areas to 1 094 742 hectares covering 13 noncontiguous areas reaching into the Eastern Cape.
And we have Conservation Areas as well. However, Wikipedia tells us of the Western Cape economy:
Around 11,5 million hectare of land in the province is cultivated. Although this only represents 12.4% of the total land used for agriculture in South Africa the Western Cape produces 55% to 60% of South Africa’s agricultural exports, valued at more than R7 billion (US$1 billion) a year. The sector is also one of the fastest growing of the economy, expanding by 10.6% in 2008.
Agriculture’s 11.5 million hectares compared to 1.1 million hectares of Protected Area spread across two provinces shows us where the state’s and our priorities lie. But, at least we know why the Western Cape is regarded as a key biodiversity hotspot and how and why we’re driving our own and other species to possible extinction.
Stopping the Rot
What can we do about it? We can continue to fight the good fight – actively and passively.
If it is not hypocritical for us to worry about the loss of the Amazon, or the destruction of coral reefs, or the loss of biodiversity due to our fetish for palm oil in Indonesia, it is perhaps misguided for us to expend our energies doing so. We South Africans are not only major polluters of the air. We are by far the worst offender in the world when it comes to destroying our necessary biodiversity – if only because we have so much of it on our doorstep.
Our work is needed far closer to home.
Fight Like Hell
So, what can we as Capetonians do to slow the Sixth Mass Extinction? Ultimately, we need to decide how far we’re prepared to go in restoring and protecting our biodiversity. Fortunately, there are two ways open to us to fight for nature and a sustainable, albeit very different future to the one we might have envisioned a few decades ago.
The first is by way of on-the-ground work and conservation activism and the second is by lobbying for the immediate, high-level uptake of this message in development planning. We can become active in policing activities that negatively affect our natural vegetation by reviewing Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), registering as interested and affected parties in nearby developments affecting natural areas, and by lobbying our local City councillors (beasts of a notoriously political stripe) for conservation action.
We can also involve ourselves in citizen science by way of monitoring. Anybody interested in finding, saving, and monitoring plant species can join the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers (CREW), download the iNaturalist app and start logging species or join a local nature society, for example, a local Friends group, the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (WESSA) or the Botanical Society of South Africa.
If you’re involved with development planning in and around the City of Cape Town, encourage the densification of the city – to reduce its land footprint. Promote the densification of its hubs and the restoration of nature on the periphery. Force the reduction of air pollution by arguing the need for better transport infrastructure (such as trains that work). Promote water recycling within the city to decrease the burden placed on our aquatic ecosystems. Insist that we stop destroying our mountain ecosystems by draining them with unmonitored borehole extraction. And, for Heaven’s sake, ensure that waste is processed in accordance with set standards before dumping crap into the ocean.
We have very little time. We need to initiate drastic change on an unprecedented scale. And such change starts with each of us. In our backyard. And, in our case, that means restoring biodiversity because, without biodiversity, our Universe would be an indifferent place indeed.
Given the plight of natural ecosystems and humanity’s reliance on them for our survival, there is an urgent need to increase protection targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity to secure sufficient space for nature to thrive and adapt in our fast-changing world. This is so important because protected habitats must be part of frontline defence in efforts to mitigate climate change and to promote ecosystem and societal adaptation against its effects. Our goals need to coalesce in a joined-up strategy for planetary survival.
Roberts CM, O’Leary BC & Hawkins JP Climate change mitigation and nature conservation both require higher protected area targets 375 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2020
A note on mapping biodiversity
Thirty years ago, and despite Capetonians having been at each other’s throats for eight decades arguing the evils or otherwise of alien species, we had very little idea where and how our fynbos had grown on the Cape Peninsula before colonial times.
That all changed in 1996 with the publication of The Cape Peninsula, South Africa: Physiographical, Biological and Historical Background to an Extraordinary Hot-Spot of Biodiversity in Biodiversity and Conservation (Cowling et al 1996) and, in 2005, of Vegetation Map of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland (Mucina et al 2005).
The first paper includes the first map demarcating the habitats of different fynbos vegetation types on the Cape Peninsula.
Needless to say, Richard Cowling’s work was the result of collaboration with many fellow scientists and researchers and, to illustrate the role of endemism, few papers offer better insight into the subject than Endemism and speciation in a lowland flora from the Cape Floristic Region (Cowling & Holmes, 1992).
Today, SANBI’s BGIS site, reached through its Infobases portal, offers us rare and remarkable insight into the living world on which we have relied for so many millennia. It behooves us to thank the countless scientists and researchers who, in such a short time, have made them available to us.
Further reading
- CapeNature Western Cape Biodiversity Spatial Plan Framework 2017 Stellenbosch 2017
- City of Cape Town CCT Biodiversity Report: Celebrating a decade of biodiversity management 2008-2018 2018
- City of Cape Town City of Cape Town Nature Reserves: A network of amazing biodiversity 2010
- City of Cape Town The Cape Town Bioregional Plan (Policy Number 44854) 19 August 2015
- City of Cape Town Towards Achieving Biodiversity Targets for a Global Urban Biodiversity Hotspot: The City of Cape Town’s Biodiversity Network Oelofse G 2005
- Department of Environmental Affairs National Protected Area Expansion Strategy for South Africa 2016 DEA 2016
- Diaz S et al Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change Science 366 Issue 6471 December 2019
- IPBES Summary for Policymakers of the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) 2019
- Roberts CM, O’Leary BC and Hawkins JP Climate change mitigation and nature conservation both require higher protected area targets 375 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B
- SANBI National Biodiversity Assessment 2018: The Status of South Africa’s Ecosystems and Biodiversity Synthesis Report 2019
A shorter, edited version of this entry first appeared on the Friends of Tokai Park website.
Note: The rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 (118,000 cases in 114 countries, with 4,291 deaths), has led the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to declare it a pandemic.
The likely zoonotic origin of this and other coronaviruses (SARS, MERS, etc) should leave us in no doubt that we are increasingly facing the consequences of our industrial exploitation of other animal species (see the indirect and direct drivers of declines in nature in the IPBES graphic above).
Absent a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, quite how this pandemic will affect us in the long term is anybody’s guess.
