Cape Town - Stakeholders in the country’s biodiversity sector are making headway in implementing a national response strategy and action plan to address escalating levels in the illegal harvesting of and trading in unique plants from across the country. But the entities continue to face challenges.
The targeted plants are in the Succulent Karoo biome, which is subject to very limited socio-economic opportunities, high levels of poverty, unemployment and poor service delivery that leaves locals vulnerable to the invitation of international traders and collectors to become involved in the collection of wild plants.
The involvement of these locals in poaching syndicates is what is suspected to have driven the trade rapidly in recent years.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Cape Nature and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (Sanbi) are leading the country’s response through this plan.
Emily Kudze, senior scientific co-ordinator for the illegal succulent trade at Sanbi, explained that by the end of February 2022, a draft response strategy and action plan was developed – involving over 20 stakeholder organisations – and approved for implementation.
Katherine Forsythe, the Leslie Hill Succulent Karoo Trust project co-ordinator at WWF South Africa, said: “The plan has seven high-level objectives that guide our work to try and solve this problem.”
The first objective is to ensure the long-term survival of representative species populations through monitoring systems. The second objective is to ensure the establishment of ex-situ collections, to try and save these plants outside of their natural environment. The third objective is to capacitate the compliance and enforcement sector.
The fourth objective is to ensure the policy and regulatory environment frameworks are streamlined to support improved compliance and enforcement.
The fifth objective is to engage impoverished communities in these areas to make them aware of the biodiversity around them and empower them so that they don’t resort to poaching.
Forsythe said: “A big impact that is often missed is that through an illegal trade being present in an area, communities often see a whole lot of negative consequences becoming worse – drugs, other kinds of criminal activities – and this usually leads to an upheaval of social cohesion.”
The sixth objective to develop effective and consistent communication about the impact of the illegal trade.
The seventh objective is to explore the development of a formal economy around succulents that benefits the country and contributes to socio-economic development and conservation.
Some of the challenges in the strategy and action plan currently include the lack of sufficient funding and capacity, but the national and provincial government, together with partner organisations, are working to overcome this.