Restoring and managing natural capital towards fostering economic development: Evidence from the Drakensberg, South Africa

Abstract

Can a payment for flows of ecosystem goods and services system, following appropriate management and restoration of natural capital produced in rural areas of a developing country, be developed in a way that benefits communities, the commercial sector and the environment? This fundamental question acts as rationale for conducting an in-depth assessment as to whether the development of markets for ecosystems is both appropriate and sufficient when dealing with the restoration of natural capital of two degraded study areas within the Maloti-Drakensberg mountain range in southern Africa, which is a fire-prone grasslands ecosystem. The mountain range is South Africa's most strategic source of fresh water. While occupying less than 5% of South Africa's surface area, it produces 25% of the country's runoff through rivers, major dams, and national and international inter-basin transfers. Addressing the question, the study develops an integrated hydrology-ecology-economic model based on the functional relationships between these three aspects in managing and restoring the natural capital of the two study areas. It was found that the benefits of introducing improved management practices exceeds cost in low to medium degraded quinaries, but not in heavily degraded quinaries. The economic return on the water (baseflow) produced by such a system of improved land use management, however, far exceeds that of conventional (construction-based) water development programmes and offers meaningful economic and market development opportunities.

The Great Escarpment of southern Africa: a new frontier for biodiversity exploration

“…• Research on and protection of the Escarpment's ecological functioning and integrity is urgently required in order to maintain essential ecological services (Blignaut et al 2008(Blignaut et al , 2010. The most important example is water supply, with virtually all of southern Africa's freshwater water arising on the Escarpment.…”

“…and Lesotho and Swaziland (Van Wyk and Smith 2001;Mucina and Rutherford 2006). Ecological restoration work has been proposed for certain key water-source areas on the Escarpment in the Eastern Cape and KZN (Blignaut and Moolman 2006;Blignaut et al 2008Blignaut et al , 2010. As for the Namibian Escarpment, private game reserves and conservancies are the most effective means of environmental protection for much of the Escarpment in eastern South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland.…”

Modelling annual evapotranspiration in a semi-arid, African savanna: functional convergence theory, MODIS LAI and the Penman–Monteith equation

“…This is the fi nal version of the article that is published ahead of the print and online issue South Africa's semi-arid rangelands provide multiple ecosystem services to human societies, and are valuable not least in terms of terrestrial production, which underpins rural agricultural economies (Palmer and Yunusa 2011), and as hydrological regulators, spanning the majority of the country's important water-producing upper catchment areas (Blignaut et al 2010). Growing human use pressures and widely varying range management practices (Blignaut et al 2010), however, coupled with global climate phenomena, such as rising atmospheric CO 2 concentrations and associated woody plant encroachment, are increasingly becoming important factors affecting in the ability of rangelands to continue providing these services (Wigley et al 2010).…”

Systematic evaluation of scenario assessments supporting sustainable integrated natural resources management: evidence from four case studies in Africa

“…The uThukela basin (UTH) faces severe land degradation processes (Blignaut et al 2010) because of high stocking rates, a symptom of inappropriate grazing management, and high population densities in rural areas (DWAF 2004, SANBI 2014. In Kwazulu Natal, 28.2% of the households are engaged in agriculture, the majority of them, i.e., in livestock farming (SSA 2011).…”