. The Cape Floristic Region is one of South Africa’s three biodiversity hotspots, exhibiting extraordinary levels of endemism including c. 6,000 plant species. However, its biodiversity is threatened by urban development, agriculture, plantation forestry, and alien plant invasions; moreover, climate change is expected to have severe impacts (e.g. shrinking of the typical Fynbos biome by up to 65% by 2050).

. The project will operate in the “Garden Route” located in Eden District Municipality in the south-east of Western Cape Province. The Garden Route is comprised of the coastal strip of the District, extending over 390 km and averaging 50 km in width and bounded by mountains to the north. The region contains a unique mosaic of three of the country’s nine biomes – Fynbos, Thicket and Forest, including the country’s most outstanding extent of tall, natural forests (the Southern Cape Forests), as well as some of the country’s most important wetlands.

. The region has seen significantly increased climate variability over the past decade, with greater frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, storm surges, coastal erosion and fire. Major disasters including four “100 year floods” and the worst drought in 130 years caused local governments over EUR 33 million of damages. The insurance industry has been forced to re-evaluate its portfolio of assets in the region as claims have escalated.

. Water stress is compounded by infestation by water-intensive alien trees spreading from plantations into the critically important mountain catchments. Besides outcompeting indigenous vegetation, alien cover can reduce the water yield of a Fynbos catchment by up to 68% - which can be recovered following effective clearing. Alien clearing also reduces fire risk, predicted to increase with climate change. Preventing fires in turn reduces soil erosion, siltation of dams and estuaries, rainfall run-off and flooding.

. The area contains national and provincial protected areas, however these represent less than half of the habitat types and are not configured to promote connectivity or buffer climate change. To reduce the climate risk for human communities, enhance water provision and regulation services and support the resilience of biodiversity, the management of existing protected areas and private lands must be improved to eliminate invasive plants and allow regeneration of indigenous vegetation; connectivity must be recreated via landscape corridors including additional private and public conservation areas, enabling climate-induced relocation of plants and animals; and natural coastal defences like dune systems and estuarine mudflats need to be protected and rehabilitated.

. A number of stakeholders have begun taking proactive action: South Africa’s largest short term insurer Santam has assessed how better landscape management can reduce disaster risk; the national government now incentivises environmental rehabilitation by landowners; conservation agencies are committed to improving land management on private lands and on areas inherited from forestry; and the “Garden Route Initiative” formed by state and civil stakeholders has mapped unprotected Critical Biodiversity Areas and Ecological Support Areas requiring formal protection.

. However, the potential of functioning natural ecosystems in reducing disaster vulnerability is not yet recognised amongst local government, private businesses and landowners. The project’s partnership with the insurance company SANTAM and the Eden District government offers a unique opportunity to address this key barrier. << Read less

The project will bring together key stakeholders from the local and national levels to apply a landscape approach – working to create a mosaic of land uses that maximizes both biodiversity conservation and healthy ecosystem functioning – with the specific intent of enhancing climate risk management capabilities. This will be achieved by improving land management and rehabilitation work on private land, with new land brought under protection in corridors, as well as better management of existing protected areas.

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The exact sites of the rehabilitation work will be determined during the project preparation phase, using systematically defined national and local plans developed by the conservation community over the past decade. Systematic biodiversity planning (also known as systematic conservation planning) involves mapping a wide range of information about biodiversity features (including both biodiversity pattern and ecological processes) and patterns of land and resource use. Planners then set biodiversity targets and analyse the information using specialised software programmes linked to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Systematic biodiversity plans focus on efficient solutions which meet the required biodiversity targets in configurations which are least costly to society in terms of conflict with other valid land-uses and in terms of the area required.  Outputs are interpreted and presented as maps with associated land-use guidelines at various spatial scales – to indicate where conservation action should be focused and to assess the implications of different land-use options for biodiversity. Conversely, the maps also indicate areas which are of less interest from a biodiversity perspective, and hence where developments should be facilitated.

Systematic biodiversity planning in South Africa has enabled a focus on ecosystems and ecological processes rather than on individual threatened species. This has meant that climate change issues can be incorporated in a spatially explicit manner, enabling systematic biodiversity planning to be consciously used as a tool for climate change adaptation. It places importance on aligning biodiversity priority areas with corridors and areas of intact natural habitat that are essential for maintaining landscape-scale ecological functions and the ecosystem services they provide. In addition, these biodiversity priority areas are aligned with biophysical features that support ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change. These features include intact river and coastal corridors, mountain ranges, areas with refuge habitats such as cooler south-facing slopes and ravines, areas with a range of microclimates, altitudinal gradients, climatic gradients, areas of high topographic variation, or other ecological gradients. These are features of the landscape that increase the resilience of ecosystems to climate change, allow for migration and dispersal of species, and contribute to ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change.

A key issue is avoiding the further fragmentation of landscapes, the loss or break-up of the best and most viable natural patches, and ensuring that landscapes are retained in as connected a configuration as possible. Securing corridors of well managed, natural or near-natural habitats is seen as critical to capturing environmental gradients that allow plant and animal species to move in response to climate change (Cadman et al., 2010). Corridors also play an important role in helping human communities adapt to the effects of climate change. For example, maintaining indigenous vegetation along rivers can prevent the banks from being eroded when rivers swell during heavy rainfall. Keeping wetland ecosystems in a healthy state is critical for gathering, managing and delivering water – improving water quality, controlling erosion, sustaining river flows during dry seasons and reducing the impact of floods. Maintaining coastal dunes, mangrove swamps, kelp beds and healthy estuaries can provide natural buffers and protect human settlements against storm surges and coastal flooding, at far lower cost than engineered solutions.

Systematic biodiversity planning (incorporating climate change design principles) is being used to develop “biodiversity sector plans” across the country with broad stakeholder participation. The Garden Route Biodiversity Sector Plan (2010) is based on a fine-scale systematic biodiversity plan (1:50 000 and finer) and provides maps of “critical biodiversity areas” or CBAs, and “ecological support areas” or ESAs. CBAs are areas required to meet conservation targets for biodiversity pattern and ecological processes. ESAs are areas required to support the ecological functioning of CBAs, and/or to deliver ecosystem services. A critical difference between ESAs and CBAs is that CBAs must be maintained in a natural or near-natural state, while the emphasis with ESAs is that they should remain at least in a functional state. The maps are accompanied by land-use guidelines linked to them, a short biodiversity profile of the region to provide contextual information, monitoring and review arrangements and supporting GIS data. << Read less

The project is designed to develop adaptive capacity of public and private sector stakeholders, involving an insurance industry leader in highlighting the financial risks of failing to take action. This includes developing knowledge, demonstrating the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of EBA, and providing further resources. National government will continue to support rehabilitation through the Land Users Incentives Programme. Increased capacity of municipal and conservation staff and embedding of EBA in ongoing land use planning and management activities will also promote sustainability. << Read less

Local community governments as well as private sector stakeholders are involved in project planning and implementation. Private land owners will be consulted and engaged in sustainable land management practices, through direct dialogues, formal consultation meetings and experience exchanges.

• Natural Resource Management Land Users Incentive (attached)
The project contributes to the goals of the Natural Resource Management Programme of the national Department of Environmental Affairs with its five environmental public works programmes - Working for Water, Working for Wetlands, Working on Fire, Working for Land and Working for Forests. These programmes have both social and environmental objectives - aiming to create work opportunities, provide training and develop entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on women, youth and disabled people; and simultaneously to achieve invasive alien species management, integrated veld and forest fire management, restoration and rehabilitation of degraded land, restoration and rehabilitation of wetland systems and conversion of invasive jungles (deriving economic benefits from bush encroachment). The NRM programme recently launched a Land Users Incentive establishing a new way of working between the state and organised collectives of private landowners, through which the costs of alien clearing and other rehabilitation work can be subsidized. << Read less