Greening initiatives for EC

The Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency (ECPTA), through its conservation department has embarked on two greening initiatives, one of which is a carbon sequestration project at a provincial reserve.

Carbon sequestration is the process of removing and storing carbon that would likely be released into the atmosphere with the intention of deferring global warming.

The Carbon Sequestration Project falls under the ECPTA's Payment for Ecological Services (PES) initiative.

Based in the Great Fish River Nature Reserve, the project involves the large scale planting of Spekboom - an indigenous plant that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in high levels in its roots.

Dave Balfour, director of conservation at ECPTA, said the project was also about rehabilitating the reserve.

"There used to be Spekboom there, which was eroded by grazing," he said.

ECPTA interim CEO Sybert Liebenberg said: "The project aims to create about 1000 jobs and raise over R200-million in the global carbon trading market."

Explaining the payment aspect of the initiative, Liebenberg said: "Through the use of monetary and in-kind payments, PES aims to incentivise landowners and communities to maintain intact ecosystems, restore the natural environments of degraded land, and to use natural resources sustainably.

"PES recognises that landowners and communities face opportunity costs in foregoing certain economic activities to conserve and restore natural environments and that compensation is necessary to make these costs acceptable, particularly for poor people.

"The justification for these payments is that conserved ecosystems can provide important natural services, such as regulating the flow of water out of catchments, the silt loading in rivers, pollination, and clean air or sequestering carbon," he said.

Another one of the agency's green initiatives involves the maintenance of clean water in the Baviaanskloof Reserve near Port Elizabeth.

Balfour said with properly managed mountains in the Baviaanskloof area comes clean water, which is easier and cheaper to purify and less damaging to the dams it flows into as it has little, if any, silt.

He said there was a problem countrywide where mud and sand particles fill up dams until the dams can no longer hold anymore water. He said this led to the building of new dams, however the maintenance of clean water with less mud and sand particles from places such as the Baviaanskloof could prevent this.

The Baviaanskloof project, however, is still in the developmental stages as not all the stakeholders are yet onboard.

The ECPTA also plans to embark on one more initiative in the Mzimvubu valley.

"It's essentially about trying to make rural communities less vulnerable to climate change," said Balfour.

Source: Daily Dispatch