Bioregional plan a milestone towards sustainable development

"This plan sets a notable benchmark, and it is certainly fitting that it has been achieved by a municipality with such rich biological diversity, where five of SA's nine biomes converge. The area boasts the fynbos, albany thicket, forest, Nama Karoo and grassland biomes - a level of diversity that is globally unparalleled for a city," says SRK Consulting principal environmental scientist, Warrick Stewart.

He emphasised the social and economic value of biodiversity, such as attenuating floods, providing clean water of a drinking quality standard, facilitating the pollination of important agricultural crops to support food security, and providing primary sources of food like fish from the wild.

Valuable services

"Ecosystems provide a range of valuable services that we take for granted because we often don't pay in full for the services they provide," he said. "When inappropriately located, development results in the loss of important ecosystems and communities often end up paying for the long-term costs of losing these important ecological assets. Good planning means retaining our priority ecological assets when we develop our new settlements and roll out associated services. If we undermine ecosystem services like flood attenuation, for instance, we will have to pay more to install and maintain expensive flood attenuation infrastructure."

The bioregional plan provides clear priorities and guidelines for all decisions that impact on biodiversity, including land-use planning, environmental assessment and authorisations, and natural resource management in the municipal area. SRK Consulting produced the Conservation Assessment and Plan for the NMBM in 2010, which underpins the gazetted document, and also assisted with the gazetting process.

"One of the most exciting and challenging achievements of the conservation plan was to minimise the potential conflict between biodiversity and other forms of land-use. This involved a lengthy process of engaging a range of players from town planners and property developers to municipal service departments, to understand their needs and to reconcile conflicts," said Stewart.

Priorities are specified

"A bioregional plan like this makes development decisions easier, as the biodiversity conservation priorities within the municipal area are clearly specified. In this way, the plan supports the principles of integrated development planning and sustainable development set out in the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA) of 1998. It is also fully integrated with the Municipality's Spatial Development Framework to achieve the best balance between conserving priority biodiversity and accommodating the needs of other sectors."

While broader biodiversity plans have been conducted at provincial level, a municipal level plan like this can show fine-scale detail of critical biodiversity areas. These are terrestrial and aquatic features that are vital for maintaining a representative proportion of functional ecosystems and the associated goods and services they provide to the municipality's residents and visitors, and which therefore need to be kept in their natural state.

"Examples of these features in NMBM include the lowland fynbos in the southern part of the metropolitan area," said Stewart, "as well as river systems such as the Swartkops River and estuary, which is SA's top temperate estuary for subsistence value and a vital nursery for fish stocks."

Land use guidelines

Having detailed these critical areas, the plan goes on to provide accompanying land use guidelines for avoiding loss or degradation of natural habitat and good development practice at appropriate natural sites outside of the network of critical biodiversity areas.

The NMBM's bioregional plan will now be put to work in guiding reactive decisions on environmental impact assessment, agricultural land-use and development control. It will also be used in proactive forward planning - in integrated development plans, spatial development frameworks and zoning schemes - as well as conservation initiatives such as biodiversity stewardship and expanding protected areas.