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Conservation

Park Planning and Development

Latest News

• Media Release: Kruger elephants move to Mozambique

  Date: 2008-09-16

  Six bull elephants will be relocated to Gorongosa National Park (GNP) in Mozambique from the Kruger National Park (KNP) this month as part of a plan to restore the 350 000 hectare park to its former glory.

The expansion in the number and size of many of our national parks over the last ten years has been driven by SANParks desire to meet its national mandate of conserving an ecologically sustainable and representative sample of South Africa’s biodiversity and landscapes. It is also realized that these areas are generally better conserved in larger systems, which in turn offer greater socio-economic opportunities to their regional economies.

There has been a similar realization of the need to increase the number and size of the country’s marine protected areas from 2% to 20% of the coastline to conserve biodiversity and also the threatened inshore fish stocks. This expansive conservation thinking has required a shift towards an ecosystem-landscape scale type of conservation planning.

The recently promulgated Protected Areas (PAA) and Biodiversity (BA) Acts has placed greater responsibilities and accountability upon SANParks to the public, local and national government. In particular, greater emphasis has been placed upon a park planning and management function to improve conservation and its implementation effectiveness.

In this regard the Park Planning & Development section within Conservation Services has had to rise to the important challenge of expanding our parks based upon sound conservation principles, as well as help develop the park management planning frameworks necessary to guide park planning and the management of them. In terms of the Protected Areas Act (PAA), SANParks has submitted management plans for each park to the Minister for approval.

The Park Planning & Development Unit, with assistance from the other sections in Conservation Services has been largely responsible in developing and delivering the plans which will collectively, along with corporate, chart SANParks course for the next five years. This process of developing the plans has exposed both the gaps and challenges facing SANParks in its attempt to deliver on the parks conservation objectives.

Functions of the Park Planning & Development section:

1. Park planning integration & coordination: Integrate planning initiatives throughout SANParks to provide a coordinated planning framework.

2. Park management plan design, review & assessment: The review and drafting of the current management plans will remain an ongoing and demanding task, particularly if the plans are to conform to adaptive planning principles, and are to be effective in guiding and measuring management actions and upward linkages with Corporate strategies. Part of this is the roll out of the State of Biodiversity reporting system. Establishing and rolling out an environmental management system remains important with regard to minimizing the parks human footprints. Its direct linkage with the plan and review of its implementation remain important to the park and SANParks as a responsible organization.

3. Park system design: Biodiversity: South Africa is an international leader in systematic conservation planning for conservation of systems, and the current conservation paradigm at a national level (SANBI, DEAT) is based on systematic assessment and planning. It is critical that SANParks synergistically aligns itself with the national norms. Furthermore, it remains important that outputs of conservation planning are directly interfaced with park management via the conservation development frameworks (CDF’s) and zonation plans.

a) Conservation planning

Conservation planning forms the basis of all conservation actions and as such need be based upon the best conservation planning practices. SANParks’ conservation actions and prioritization needs to be:
• Clearly demonstrated to be meeting national priorities as defined by SANBI
• Developing and implementing national and international best-practice methods.
• Monitored, evaluated, documented and publicly reported in terms of its contributions to meeting national and regional conservation priorities

b) Internal spatial development planning

The PAA requires that each park must have visitor use zoning plan setting out management objectives for each of the zones. This will be met by the broader integrated CDF planning process which SANParks has now accepted. Also, if best practice is to achieved and if the principles of sustainable tourism are to be implemented then each development in the park needs to be designed in terms of these principles along with other concepts such as touching the Earth lightly, green buildings etc thus providing a planning framework from the CDF down to the precinct plans associated with each development. The CDFs developed with input from conservation planning would be interfaced into the park plans and regional planning initiatives.

4. Park system design: Expansion & establishment: This function will primarily focus on the actual delivery of the panning recommendations associated with land inclusions (via acquisition and contractual inclusion) and the management of key conservation development projects.

a) Acquisition & land database management

Physically expanding and consolidating the national park system in line with national targets remains an important focus of SANParks conservation mandate. This is achieved through donations, acquisitions or contractual inclusions of land parcels.

b) Park expansion & development projects

Focuses on the delivery of specific donor funded projects that integrate park expansion and development in a regional context such as is being undertaken in Addo Elephant National Park, Garden Route Initiative (GRI), and the Namaqua projects.

5. Park system design: Marine conservation: The prime focus of this function is to provide a strategic planning service to SANParks to facilitate the identification, inclusion, establishment of MPAs adjacent to our coastal national parks and their consolidation into SANParks, ensuring that priorities are set, all available staff are used to best effect, budgets are set and managed, and funds required are sourced.