Often overlooked as swampy wasteland or concreted over by untrammelled development, wetlands are the lifeblood of our planet, but they often aren’t valued as such.
Hence this year’s theme for World Wetlands Day: “Wetlands for our Future”, which has a bearing on some positive interventions close to home in the uMngeni catchment of KwaZulu-Natal.
Worldwide wetland loss and degradation is occurring at extremely high rates.
This rapid decline in river and wetland health means that access to fresh water is eroding for 1-2 billion people worldwide, while flood control, carbon storage and traditional wetland livelihoods all suffer.
Here at home, it is estimated that South Africa has lost upwards of 50 percent of its wetlands, making them the most threatened of all our ecosystems. What is driving this loss?
In a recent study at a global scale it was found that drainage for crop production and plantations, wetland conversion for fish production, conversion for logging, construction of dams and commercial, residential and industrial developments were key activities.
No surprise that the study pinpointed the underlying drivers of wetland loss were socio-economic and political factors, such as population growth and financial policies. Arguably, the South African context for wetland loss is very similar.
What, then, if we have no wetlands in the future? For a start, it is likely we will feel the effects of climate change more heavily; more intensive and frequent storms and droughts. This is because wetland loss and degradation undermine the ability of wetlands to provide their free ecosystem services to humanity.
These include water supply, flood control, carbon storage, maintenance of biodiversity, retention of sediment and nutrients, and recreation.
In his book, Strategy for Sustainability, Adam Werbach cites wetland loss in the US, and New Orleans in particular, as one of the major reasons why Hurricane Katrina did so much damage to that region.
The same can be attributed to the 2010-2011 floods that affected many parts of South Africa, resulting in 141 known fatalities and an estimated 20 000 hectares of cropland damage. Malawi and Mozambique have just experienced intense flooding during this rainy season with the effects still being quantified.
Storing and moving water to where it is needed costs money. The uMngeni River in KwaZulu-Natal supplies about 5 million people with drinking water and underpins the third biggest economy in the country. But not enough water is produced in the catchment to meet demand, so water from the Mooi River is pumped over a hill and into the neighbouring uMngeni River near Nottingham Road.
Just flipping the start switch on the pumps cost more than R30 000 in electricity a number of years ago. It goes without saying that the recent spikes in electricity costs will have increased this amount significantly.
The river is also experiencing increasing pollution loads. The extensive number of storage dams on the Mooi-uMngeni river system (six in all) are currently able to assimilate the pollution, but for how much longer? The dirtier the water, the more expensive it is to clean, and the more you and I pay for our tap water.
Wetlands and rivers essentially rely on their surrounding catchments for the bulk of their water. The more altered the catchments are from natural, the more impacts there generally is on water quality, quantity and timing of flows.
Less than a third of the upper uMngeni and Umvoti River catchments remain natural. The rest of the land surface is mostly under intensive agriculture and urbanisation. Nevertheless, we need our urban infrastructure and agriculture.
Farmers, after all, grow much of our food and the sector creates significant employment, especially in the job-scarce rural areas.
What we don’t need is for the river to be nutrient enriched from agricultural run-off, sub-optimal irrigation and riverbanks and wetlands invaded with water-thirsty alien invasive trees, just like we don’t need failing sewage treatment works decanting polluted water into our rivers.
What we do need is for the public and private sector key role-players to be good custodians of our wetlands and rivers.
In particular, we need agri-business – which includes the banks, insurers and farmers as a key sector in the catchment, to work together to understand the shared risk of wetland and water degradation, as well as the shared value water and wetlands have for their business.
Fortunately, wetlands are more resilient than many other ecosystems. As long as they have not been irreversibly lost to cultivation or concrete, many wetlands that are in poor condition can be rehabilitated to at least a basic level of ecological and hydrological functioning, thus restoring some of their (free) ecosystem services.
Large sections of wetlands in the upper uMngeni on farm land are at the moment being rehabilitated as part of a three- to five-year Working for Wetlands project that will help secure these systems for future generations.
We are also seeing signs of change in big business. Plantation companies, such as Mondi, working in the water stressed uMngeni catchment and elsewhere in the country, are managing their wetlands, rivers and catchments in a transparent way, using internationally recognised responsible practice standards.
Likewise sugar cane farmers, sugar cane millers and the big industrial buyers of refined sugar are now working alongside the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF to ensure that nearly 100 000ha of sugar cane land in KZN are responsibly and sustainably managed.
Perhaps most exciting of all is a recent partnership of the main private and public sector role-players in the uMngeni catchment. Their aim is to work together to ensure good stewardship of the rivers and wetlands in the catchment.
More than ever before, consumers, employees and investors are beginning to share a common purpose and a passion for companies or business that do well by doing good.
* Koopman is the WWF Mondi Wetlands Programme: KZN Resilient Landscapes Project Co-ordinator, WWF South Africa.