Country Name: South Africa
Author: Kader Asmal

Professor Kader Asmal, a member of Parliament in South Africa and the founder of the Working for Water

Programme, spoke to the Katoomba Group last month. The Ecosystem Marketplace is pleased to reproduce his speech for our readers in this article.

See more on Kader Asmal in the Ecosystem Marketplace profile of his career.

1994 saw the advent of the first democratic Government in South Africa.

• We inherited a country whose coffers had been bled dry by the apartheid regime seeking to maintain privilege and power at all costs.


• We inherited economic and financial systems that failed to recognize social justice, and indeed failed to recognize the importance of the life-support systems upon which we ultimately all depend, and where we had to change approaches well-characterized as "all, for some, for now" to "some, for all, for ever".


• We inherited a responsibility, as Government, to redress the gross imbalances between the "haves" and the "have-nots", where race was the overriding determinant.

In the context of this meeting, it is also worth pointing out that for many of the poor, herded into non-viable "homelands" as they were under apartheid, it was the "ecosystems services" that were their primary livelihoods—and that these were being systematically marginalized through institutionalized poverty, over-utilization, habitat destruction and pollution.

President Nelson Mandela asked me to take the portfolio of Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry in our first democratic Cabinet. As a human rights scholar, teacher and lawyer, this was not an automatic comfort zone.

But one of the benefits of such a background is a commitment to processes that interrogated what my then officials were telling were the best options for water security.

I insisted on full public participation in the decision-making processes around new dams and other proposals to augment our water supply in our country. It terrified some of my officials, who felt that engineers already knew what was best for people, and that such a process might lead to "sub-optimal" decisions!

One of the first efforts we made in such public participation, early in 1995, was over proposals from the Department to build a pipe-line from two of Eskom's dams through to Cape Town. At the public meeting, there were two counter-arguments put forward that intrigued me.

• The first was that it would be a more cost-effective alternative to get people to use water more efficiently through water conservation (demand-management) steps.


• The second was that we would do better to clear invasive alien plants that are using increasingly significant amounts of our precious water.

The seed was fully sown after a slide presentation developed by a group of leading ecologists, called the Fynbos Forum, and paid for by the World Wide Fund for Nature—South Africa. But seeds need water if they are to grow. It was my dear friend and comrade, Minister Jay Naidoo, who provided funding from the Government's Reconstruction and Development Programme to kick-start the initiative. I had been convinced by the arguments of the water and ecological benefits of the programme, and knew that it had the potential to empower our people in its labour-intensive approaches. Without even first undertaking a business plan, I approached Minister Naidoo for funding of R25 million for the programme.

The funding came through in mid-September 1995. By the end of the month we had developed a comprehensive business plan, and on the 16 October 1995 I cut down the first tree that launched the Working for Water programme.

From this modest beginning, the programme has developed into one of the flagship programmes of our democratic Government. It and its partnerships now boast an annual budget of R550 million, excluding the successful off-shoots of the programme, such as the Working on Fire and Working for Wetlands programmes. It has grown to this level because it addresses so many vital issues:

• It is vital for water security. Invasive alien plants were calculated to be reducing South Africa's mean annual runoff by 7%, and this figure was set to increase almost exponentially as the plants spread and grew.


• Invasives are the single biggest threat to our biological diversity. Aside from the obvious impact on indigenous plants (South Africa being one of the real "hot spots" for plant biodiversity), I was intrigued to find out that fully half of our endemic damselflies and dragonflies were threatened with extinction by the riparian invasion of the black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) from Australia.


• They are a major threat to the ecological functioning of our life-support systems—today's theme.


• They are also a major threat to agriculture, and the productivity of the land.


• Many of the species exacerbate the intensity and impact of wild fires, with consequences for a loss of life, livelihoods and environmental impacts.


• They lead to soil erosion, mud-slides, and siltation of rivers, dams and estuaries (the last-mentioned having a cascading impact on pelagic fish, many of which breed in estuaries).


• They cause problems in terms of water quality.


• They impact on fresh-water fishing and the recreational use of water bodies, and harbour mosquitoes and snails that lead to greater problems with malaria and bilharzia.

What is more, it is clear that climate change, invasives and habitat destruction form a "lethal cocktail" that will exacerbate the impact on life and livelihoods. For example, with the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it has been shown that the roots and shoots of trees will get bigger and bigger. This will worsen the impact of these plants on water security and biological diversity, as well as their many social, economic and political ramifications.

In all of these and other impacts, consequences are disproportionately felt across our very uneven social environment. It is the poor, inevitably, who bear the greatest consequences of these impacts. It is they whose livelihoods are lost when they cannot afford to work their lands, or when formal jobs are lost as a result of the invasions.

Chromolaena odorata in the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park

This has been so dramatically shown in the measurements of the invasion by triffid weed (Chromolaena odorata) in the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal. When driving around, the luscious greenery looks attractive to the uninformed. But much of it is triffid weed, which the game species do not eat. Measurements have shown a rapid spread of triffid weed from 1985, to a point where the projection was that within about a decade, the entire park—the third oldest in the world—could have been overrun by the weed.

If that were allowed to happen, the game would not be able to survive. If the game went, so too would the tourists. Without the tourists, some 3,000 jobs would be lost, and over R100 million a year to the local economy—this in one of the poorest parts of our country.

And it gets far, far worse. The impact is not just in nature reserves, but across the landscape, and the resource-poor farmers are being further marginalized by the costs of trying to contain this weed on their land. What stands between these rural poor and the loss of their meagre livelihoods is the Working for Water programme.

I should add that it also impacts upon our neighbouring countries, notably Swaziland, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and their own developmental challenges.

Direct benefits for the poor

Invasive species are bad for business. It is obviously so when invasive rats are eating one-third of all grain produced in Africa. It is obviously so when more and more invasive diseases threaten human health, crops, livestock or the tourism industry. It is obviously so when the invasion of the American bramble (Rubus cuneifolius) in the Drakensberg has already replaced grazing land that would have supported 1,700 head of cattle. Less obviously, it has been shown for invasive species that have significant benefits – notably that the costs associated with the invasive black wattle (Acacia mearnsii) outweigh the benefits of having the species in the country. It makes sense, economically, to invest in the prevention and control of invasives.

What is particularly compelling in a developing country such as ours, is that the implications for social justice are so strong. Not only does the programme protect the lives and livelihoods of all, and especially the most marginalized (the poor, but also the environment and its biodiversity), but it creates opportunities as well.

• Working for Water offers employment and training to some 29,000 people.


• It targets the poorest of the poor in its offering these opportunities, and has progressive targets for the employment of women (60% of the workforce), youth (20% between 18 and 25 years of age), the disabled (2%), as well as single-headed households, military veterans, those living with HIV/AIDS, former inmates, and others whom South Africa's bitter history marginalized.


• It has also taken important steps to de-racialize our still-fractured society, promoting transformation with a strong emphasis on breaking down the racial barriers of the past.


• It has very progressive social development approaches that support workers in terms of issues of health, violence, substance abuse, child-care and more.

I must add that it was primarily the success of the Working for Water programme that kept Public Works programmes afloat in the early days of democracy, and led to what is now the Government's multi-billion Expanded Public Works Programme.

This multi-pronged approach—which I believe is now called "mainstreaming" benefits—had not been explicitly demonstrated to be able to work in our country before, and the success of the programme has led to this having now become a fairly standard way of conducting business in Government.

In my farewell speech to the programme's management and over 3,000 workers in 1999 (after being asked to take over as Minister of Education), I made the following point: "The future of this programme is in our own hands. We must satisfy our clients, be they the local authorities, farmers or the Government. We must offer services for which they are willing to pay, and we must deliver on time, on budget, efficiently and without corruption." Clearly, with a budget that has increased from R25 million to R660 million across the programme and its offspring—for Working on Fire and Working for Wetlands too are selling their outputs —this message has been heeded.

To date, the primary focus of Working for Water has been a payment through general taxes for the various ecosystem services that the programme offers. I would argue that this is appropriate.

• Firstly, the problem of invasives is one that impacts on good and bad land-users and water-users alike. It makes operational sense to help people to get on top of a problem that, in some cases, was not of their making. (Indeed, for many invasive species, it was of Government's making.)


• Secondly, one cannot simply look at the "market" to determine who should pay, and who should benefit, for it is beyond dispute that the market will never be able to ensure equity. What is more, the tendency of the market to ignore externalities—the social costs, opportunity costs, cumulative and synergistic impacts of development—means that ecosystem services are often undervalued, inappropriately discounted, and exploited in unsustainable ways.

My point is that payment for ecosystem services should not be seen simplistically as merely a "market" mechanism. It certainly is possible to seek to do this, too, through taxes, rates, levies and other charges, as well as other incentives and disincentives. There must be a regulatory framework within which we can seek to promote such equity, and appropriate long-term planning. This we sought to provide in the National Water Act in 1998, albeit to only those aspects of the impact of invasive alien plants that affected our mandate.

Greater Hermanus Water Conservation Programme

Our first pilot programme in this regard was the Greater Hermanus Water Conservation Programme in 1996. When we were approached to augment the water supply to this coastal holiday town, we said that they must first invest in water conservation—demand management, and the conservation of supply through the control of invasives in the catchment of their dam. Both of these were very weakly developed (as in the rest of the country), and it simply made far better economic sense—and ethical sense—to first focus on these.

We initiated a "12-point plan" that had escalating block rate tariffs at the heart, whereby those who drove the marginal cost of water would pay the marginal price. In the first Summer season, we dropped water use by 32%; increased revenue from water sales by 20%; made water affordable for the poor (the precursor for the Government's free basic water and electricity policy), and had an astonishing level of 95% support from the residents in the first volatile years of democracy.

One of the aspects of the work was that part of the revenue raised through the change in water tariffs would pay for the clearing of invasive alien plants. Moreover, this would create training and work opportunities for unemployed people in the town. It was a scheme that worked extremely well, although perversely the sector has had limited success in mainstreaming this integrated approach to date.

Trading Account payments

The notion of getting water-users to pay for the protection of their water supply was something that we initiated more broadly in 1996 and beyond, with the Trading Account of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry being a major source of funding for the programme. What is more, the Department's own planners were showing that (with demand-management conservation) this offered the best return on investment of options to improve water security.

More detailed analysis has been done since then, showing the benefits for efficient catchment management through the clearing of invasive alien plants from our watersheds, wetlands and riparian areas. This is now being incorporated into the water-pricing strategy.

We were able to determine that charging water-users for their use of water, and using part of the money raised to ensure levels of water security, was acceptable to water-users, was equitable, and was in their own long-term interests.

Additional payments

More recently this has seen voluntary charges being put forward, where water as an ecosystem service is in short supply. Through the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, with Working for Water, negotiations are at an advanced stage to have a proposed Platinum mine secure the necessary water by funding the clearing of invasive alien plants in the catchment of the mine's potential source of water.

Through the emerging Working for Woodlands programme—yet another offshoot of Working for Water —payments for ecosystem services in terms of carbon sequestration, as well as rehabilitation of land and ecotourism, are being supported.

There are many examples, too, of how we can look at the value-added industries associated with the need to clear the invasive alien plants. The programme has had some success in this regard, such as with the replacement of the rooikrans (Acacia cyclops), a massive fire hazard to Jefferies Bay, with indigenous Restionaceae farmed for thatching reed; with the construction of Eco-coffins that provide affordable and dignified funerals for the poor, and the emerging efforts to use woodchip from felled invasives to make ceilings for the houses of the poor, improving not only their health and comfort, but having a remarkable potential impact on peak demand for electricity, and the need for additional supply of power.

I know that this last example is treating invasives as an ecosystem service, but the truth of the matter is that very few invasives will ever be eradicated. By this I do not wish to imply that we should soften our approach to the prevention and control of invasives. But rather we must take whatever value we can from the situation in which we find ourselves.

Conclusion

I want to salute the Working for Water programme as one of the world's pioneering initiatives to demonstrate that economic and social development and the environment can not only work hand in hand, but indeed add real value to one-another. It has been built on the back of extraordinary dedication of staff to the many outcomes—some would say "causes"—that it pursues. It is surely a programme that offers lessons as to how political will, good science, dedicated public servants and an informed public can do what is in the best interests of all.

For more on payments for ecosystem services in South Africa, please see the following articles:

Payments for Watershed Services

Ecosystem Farming


First published: December 18, 2006

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