Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 24 May 2010

How can communities develop economically and socially without damaging the fragile ecosystems they live in?

That was the primary question at a seminar hosted at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on Friday by the national Department of Social Welfare, the UN’s Leadership for Environment and Development (Lead) programme and the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality.

Agathosma serpyllacea - coastal fynbos, Western Cape

The seminar is one of six set to take place over the next six months in preparation for the International Training Session on Population, Climate Change and Development Conference in Port Elizabeth, in October.

One of the speakers at Friday’s event, Schalk Potgieter, assistant director of strategic planning in the municipality’s human settlement unit, said the nexus of population development and critical ecosystems was a crucial one in Mandela Bay.

Five biomes or broad indigenous vegetation zones meet here and two, coastal fynbos and thicket, are particularly fragile.

These ecosystems are vulnerable to human development and also to climate change, which will likely result in rising seas and increasingly fierce and frequent storms – putting pressure especially on impoverished communities living on marginal land.

This can result in migration by “climate change refugees” and conflict, in turn, with people in the areas where they migrate to, and greater pressure on that land. Continue reading Fragile ecosystems under threat of growing communities