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“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,” said
Stewart. “The area boasts the Fynbos, Albany
Thicket, Forest, Nama Karoo and Grassland
biomes – a level of diversity that is globally
unparalleled for a city.”
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.
“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
The bioregional plan was gazetted on
30 March 2015 and now provides clear priorities
and guidelines for all decisions that impact
on biodiversity, including land-use planning,
environmental assessment and authori-
sations, 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.
Stewart said that bioregional plans assist
local municipalities in spatially identifying
priority sensitive areas. This information is
crucial to enabling municipalities to effectively
develop their Spatial Development Frameworks,
as per the Spatial Planning and Land Use
Management Act (SPLUMA) 16 of 2013.
“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,” said
Stewart. “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.”
He said the National Environmental
Management: Biodiversity Act (NEM: BA) 10
of 2004 requires all government bodies –
including municipalities – through the
gazetting of the Bioregional Plan to take
biodiversity into account when planning and
implementing service delivery.
“A bioregional plan like this makes
development decisions easier, as the
biodiversity conservation priorities within the
municipal area are clearly specified,” he said.
“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.”
Biodiversity plans
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
Environmental assessment
EC Metro gets SA’s first
BIOREGIONAL PLAN
gazetted
The gazetting of South Africa’s first
bioregional plan – for the Nelson
Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) in
the Eastern Cape – is a milestone on
the road towards the more sustainable
development of SA towns and cities,
according to SRK Consulting (SA)
principal environmental scientist,
Warrick Stewart.