Living Land

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African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), was formally

established. During the same period there were a number of

devastating wildfires across the fire-prone biomes of South

Africa. Often the most devastating ones were associated with

high fuel loads, the result of dense stands of invasive alien

plants which caused very hot fires that not only threatened

infrastructure but had devastating impacts on topsoils and

biodiversity. In September 2004 Working on Fire (WoF) was

established, again as a sibling programme of WfW.

The Subtropical Thicket Restoration Programme — the

forerunner of what would become Working for Ecosystems

— was also established in 2004 to develop a scientific plat-

form for catalysing public and private sector investment in

the restoration of more than 1 million hectares of degraded

subtropical thicket in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. After

some years the project was expanded to the grasslands and

savannah areas of the Maloti-Drakensberg range in the north-

ern parts of the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the other

northern provinces, more specifically Limpopo.

With the establishment of Working for Ecosystems there

was now an integrated programme in place for the imple-

mentation of restoration and maintenance of ecological

infrastructure and the delivery of ecosystem services. It

completed the family of programmes that could address

challenges related to water security, climate adaptation and

mitigation, improved productive potential of land, natural

disaster risk management and most importantly, restoration

of biodiversity.

Images: Christo Marais

Top: WoF has more than 30 per cent women in its employment and over 90 per cent of the fire fighters are younger than 35

Bottom: To date some 2.8 million hectares of invasive alien plants have been treated. Invasive alien plants cover around 20 million hectares of South Africa

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