Today the Deputy Minister and I presented the Department of Environmental Affairs’ Budget Vote Speech. Our Budget Vote Speech showed an alignment between the Department’s strategic priority areas to the National Development Plan.
Our challenge in the context of a nation which is a developing state is to find a healthy balance between the three pillars – sustainable economic growth, social development and environmental sustainability. In pursuit of South Africa's developmental pathway, a shared vision and common goal of sustainability has emerged as a strong driver of industry values as well as societal behaviour.
The National Development Plan reminds us of the escalating costs of maintaining built infrastructure in the face of increasing natural disasters, as well as the rising costs of delivering clean water to communities. This suggests that the value of biodiversity assets and ecological infrastructure now urgently needs to be understood by those sectors facilitating the implementation of this Plan.
We have now developed initiatives to support effective decision-making in programmes such as the Presidential Strategic Integrated Projects or SIP’s. This we do through the strategic information and decision-making support tools that have already been established, like the Biodiversity Geographical Information System amongst other innovations
True to our commitment in our Budget Speech last year, we celebrated the International Day for Biodiversity this year by launching the Biodiversity and Mining Guideline jointly with the mining sector.
South Africa has not fully exploited the economic, commercial, industrial or large scale livelihood dependency on the oceans surrounding our country. Geographically, our country is centrally positioned between the East and West trade routes. Opportunities for ship support industry and ports enjoy a healthy market. South Africa, however, has no large bulk commercial ships on its national ships register.
South Africa has an abundance of terrestrial natural and marine living resources, which makes us well placed to exploit the blue economy that our location provides. More recently countries that have invested in ocean research and engineering have appreciated the development advantage that can be accessed through oceans. In this regard, our Green Paper on policy for the National Environmental Management of the Oceans was submitted to Cabinet last year for approval to publish for comments. At present we are working on the comments received and we plan to re-submit to Cabinet for final approval.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s CoP18 Conference was held in Doha, Qatar late last year. This secured the Durban legacy with an outcome that concluded the necessary provisions to give effect to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, including legal, operational, ambition and environmental integrity considerations.
The development of a management strategy for environmental impact assessment on integrated permitting system to address key concerns and constraints within the current environmental impact management system are well underway.
We must acknowledge the good work done with the Department of Energy in processing all the applications for renewable energy. Up to 25 000 megawatts of wind and solar projects have been authorised for the various parts of the country to date. This is far more than the original quota for the first three rounds of the bidding programme. The quota set by the Department of Energy was 3 750 megawatts.
In order to facilitate and support accelerated implementation of the sustainable development initiatives, particularly the Strategic Infrastructure Programme, a streamlined environmental authorisation process has been introduced. Other tools, such as Strategic Environment Assessments are being developed to further accelerate authorisations while ensuring sound environmental impact management in line with sustainable development principles.
Our green economy interventions must support the National Development Plan to ensure that our programmes positively contribute to its targets and centrally position our sector as a hub of job creation, whilst not deviating from our mandate of protecting the integrity of our environment.
The sustainable use of indigenous biological resources is fundamental to the development of South Africa’s economy. The bioprospecting and the hunting industries particularly, are also integral to our contribution to sustainable development and green jobs in South Africa.
We are committed to improve the socio-economic benefits within the environmental sector, by creating 65 494 work opportunities which will yield 34 019 full-time equivalents jobs. The targeted designated groups are women, youth and people living with disabilities.
We have accessed a total amount of R2.39 billion from the Expanded Public Works Programme for our Environmental Programmes in the new financial year, which will boost the job-creation objective of Government, and secure vital environmental benefits from the work to be done.
The jobs will not be created in isolation to the Department’s mandate; hence the Working for Water, Working on Fire and the Environmental Protection and Infrastructure programmes, through their various sub-programmes, will also deliver environmental outputs such as rehabilitating 105 wetlands, cleaning more than 2 100 kilometres of coastline, rehabilitation of estuaries and dunes, construction of boardwalks to facilitate access, planting trees, building of waste buy-back centres, removing invasive alien plants, provision of infrastructure to facilitate conservation and rehabilitating thousands of hectares of land this year. The jobs created will be coupled with skills development wherein 184 263 accredited training person days will be achieved.
During this financial year, we aim to spend just over 1.13 billion Rands on the Working for Water and associated programmes, whilst Working on Fire will get 406 million Rands, and the Environmental Protection and Infrastructure Programmes will get 817 million Rands.
Our People and Parks project continues to benefit local communities through access and benefit sharing such as harvesting of natural resources, access to graves, free access to protected areas for educational purposes, monetary pay-outs to claimants which result in reducing poverty eradication.
Through this programme we:
- Launched the national co-management framework which enables innovative governance by conservation authorities and local communities, enables active participation and decision making in the management of protected areas.
- Facilitated co-management agreements with the Nwanedi land claimants in Limpopo and the Songimvelo Community in Mpumalanga.
- Established business linkages to support community initiatives adjacent to protected areas and also encourage communities to establish cooperatives/small businesses to enable them to tender for jobs within protected areas.
- Procured goods and services amounting to R30 million from SMMEs within the 30 protected areas.
- 5 852 jobs were created and 241 SMMEs were developed by provinces and management authorities through funding obtained from Environmental Protection and Infrastructure Programme.
- 509 people from 15 protected areas benefited in the capacity building on the use of natural resources
- With regards to our wetlands, a total of R530 million has been invested in the rehabilitation of 906 wetlands. To date, the programme has provided 12 848 employment opportunities.
This year we celebrated the World Wetlands Day with the Kareedouw community in the Koukamma Local Municipality. We chose the Kromme River catchment which experienced dramatic floods in 2006 which resulted in heavy loss of life and property. Ten million has been invested to rehabilitation of this wetland. A total of 60 local people were employed. The Kromme River catchment supplies about 40% of Port Elizabeth’s water, via the Churchill Dam.
On the international front, we are intensifying the collaborative law enforcement effort to combat this increasing scourge of rhino poaching as well as international cooperation with recipient and transit countries such as Vietnam, Thailand and China. To date we have signed Memorandums of Understanding with Vietnam and China and we aim to sign similar agreements with Mozambique and other Asian countries.
The reality of rhino poaching, particularly in the Kruger National Park (KNP), continues to be a major challenge for the country, especially when considering prevalent financial constraints. This situation is fuelled by a thriving black market trade in rhino horn.
We presented this budget vote a few days before Environmental Month under the theme: Think, Eat, Save. Our plan is intact and we will embark on various activities as we celebrate Environment Month.
