ENVIRONMENT-AFRICA: Growing Need for Regional Cooperation

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Dec 26 2001 (IPS) - The news that some of Southern Africa’s most devastating “natural” disasters of 2001 were in fact man made has had foreign and environmental ministries of the region wondering if such disasters can also be “unmade”.

With a major conference on sustainable development scheduled for South Africa next year, land users and environmentalists want to ensure that there is a region left to sustain.

From the loss of valuable Indian Ocean coral reefs, to an oil spill off the Cape of Good Hope that grabbed headlines and killed thousands of seafowl, to continued devastating flooding in Mozambique, man’s manipulations of the environment wrought considerable damage this year.

“The good news,” says Swaziland’s former natural resources minister Musa Nkhambule, “is that governments now see the need to work together on the environment”.

Swaziland and South Africa were collaborators in 2001 on the Maguga Dam, a commercial venture that was Swaziland’s largest public works project and was built to harness the Komati River that joins both countries for irrigation purposes and hydroelectric generation.

But the two-nation project, a result of hard bargaining that resulted in a treaty beneficial to both countries, was seen as a blueprint for the type of agreements needed in other areas that touch upon the environment.

Chief amongst these is land preservation of flood plains and the retention of wetlands. “The loss of wet lands and floodplains bring disaster as a rule, and this year has been no exception,” says environmentalist A.J. Dube of the University of Natal, South Africa.

Half of South Africa’s wetlands have been drained for agriculture, reported the environmental monitoring organisation the Worldwatch Institute.

Wetlands are defined as coastal swamps and marshes and inland floodplains. These are often the easiest areas to drain, exposing fertile soil used for cultivation.

But there was a price to pay in 2000 and again in 2001. Heavy late summer rains could not be absorb as floodplains that had done the job for centuries were now farmland. Rainwater swelled rivers in South Africa, inundated vast sections of the Mphumalanga province, and closed the famous Kruger National Park. But worse was to come further downstream, in Mozambique. Rivers burst their banks, and floodwaters killed 400 people. Hundreds of thousands of people were rendered homeless. Roads and rail lines were washed away, and painstaking efforts by one of the world’s poorest countries to reconstruct its economy after decades of civil war were struck a severe setback.

From a positive growth rate of 15 percent in 1999, Mozambique’s economy saw a negative growth of minus 5 percent last year. Growth of 10 percent in 2001 would have been higher if a repeat of the flooding had not occurred.

Unfortunately, early this year, heavy rainfall again sent ocean- bound rivers that originate in South Africa streaming over their banks.

Exacerbating the problem was overgrazing of grasslands in the upper watersheds of the Limpopo River in South Africa. Too many cattle denuded the hills of vegetation. When summer rains fell, the moisture was not absorbed by roots, and washed downhill, carrying with it valuable topsoil.

Downstream in the Maputo province of southern Mozambique, flooding again took its toll in human life and displacement.

“We realise that some understanding with our neighbours must be achieved to lessen the consequences on Mozambique for environmental mismanagement in neighbouring states,” says a source in Mozambique’s ministry of the environment. “Just as the states of Southern Africa is bound together economically, so we are dependent ecologically.”

At least Mozambique still retains a wealth of Indian Ocean coral reefs, which should prove a tourist attraction when as the country’s tourism sector is revived.

Global warming has resulted in the “bleaching” of coral reefs, when rising ocean temperatures cause thriving colourful colonies of coral to whither into chalky skeletons.

According to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, 59 percent of the Indian Ocean’s coral reefs have been destroyed by such “bleaching”. Twenty-four percent of the world’s coral reefs are located in the Indian Ocean.

Worst hit have been countries north of Mozambique: Kenya, the Seychelles, Tanzania and Comoros. Coral losses in those countries have ranged from 80 to 90 percent, with total extinction a real possibility, reports the coral monitoring organisation.

“Pollution is a major culprit killing off the reefs, but they have also been decimated by thieves who take them for sale in Western countries, where they are prized in aquariums, and damage from commercial fishing operations,” reports the monitoring network.

Partly because of economic underdevelopment, Mozambique has been spared these problems to its coral reefs. But an economic turnaround may have damaging side effects if regional monitoring of this natural resource is not effected.

“There is little that poor African nations can do about global warming, but we can create laws to reduce the damage of fishing and coral theft in our waters,” says Dr. Rupert Guente, a Mozambican oceanographer.

Efforts to shore up the region’s environment in 2001 have been mostly ad hoc projects of individual nations, such as Botswana’s much-lauded granting of custodian-ship of ancient ethnic lands back to the San people of the Central Kalahari Desert.

After years of persecution when the hunter-gatherers were herded into detention camps, government realised the San people knew the desert environment, which was under threat from development, better than anyone, and could ensure the Kalahari’s preservation while they literally “lived off the land”.

The liberation of the San from their camps was seen as a human rights triumph as well as an environmental safeguard. In Swaziland, King Mswati saw red when it was proved that he had been tricked by false information into approving a mining operation at Malolotja Nature Reserve.

Doctored documents showed the mining would have taken place outside the reserve, but when revised maps showed the mine would be in a protected area, contrary to law, the king halted the operation.