Doctor of chemistry and founder of sustainable development solutions company Tomorrow Matters Now, Dr Jaisheila Rajput, applied her mind to the pressing need for fresh water and fuel in South Africa. She took one year (February 2016 to February 2017) to research and write about a WWF Nedbank Green Trust-funded project that can unlock freshwater [...]
A portrait of the Western Cape 300 years ago would show rolling expanses of a vegetation type with an extraordinary diversity of bulb species called Renosterveld, being grazed by large numbers of big game, including the extinct bluebuck, quagga, as well as the eland and black rhino, hence its name. The large numbers of [...]
Phosphate mining of the seabed, known as bulk marine sediment mining, has never been done anywhere in the world and is a major concern for leading marine scientists worldwide. Yet South Africa is about to become the testing ground. Despite significant objections, the Department of Mineral Resources has granted three rights to prospect for marine [...]
SHOULD MEAT BE ON THE MENU? In an interview by Heather Dugmore Australian agricultural journalist David Mason-Jones addresses what every farmer and environmentalist needs to know about livestock and global warming in his recently published book ‘Should meat be on the menu?’ The cattle industry in South Africa and many other parts of the world [...]
Cape flowers for pleasure, profit, employment and the green economy We need to look to the earth beneath our feet to see the riches of our land. This could not be more evident than in the smallest, richest floral kingdom in the world, the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), also known as the Cape Floral Kingdom. [...]
At the end of September 2016 a gyrocopter will start flying over the Eastern Cape part of the Karoo, with an instrument on board that will survey the rock down to one kilometre. It will fly at a height of 40 metres above the ground along a 10 000 km survey line, straddling the districts [...]
“You are out there in the middle of hundreds of dolphins and it is amazing and overwhelming. The water is literally boiling with dolphins and gannets and you have to remind yourself that you are there for a reason - to gather data on these animals about which very little is known.” Dr Stephanie Plön [...]
“Sea fisheries crime is a major, international, moving crime that involves vast amounts of illegal fish and seafood, including high profile, white-collar crime syndicates, and a lot of other issues, including human and drug trafficking,” says South Africa’s Professor Hennie van As, a global specialist on sea fisheries and related organised crime, who is collaborating [...]
Water is on everyone's minds, at last. It should have happened a long time ago, but now that we are facing ongoing water shortages, droughts and water quality crises, South Africa is finally paying attention to what conservation and water health mean. Foreseeing this three decades ago, the WWF-SA's Freshwater Programme has focused on a [...]
South Africa’s offshore marine ecosystems are the most poorly protected of all South African ecosystems and environments. None of South Africa’s 23 Marine Protected Areas are offshore, not even Prince Edward Island, which is yet to be declared after ten years of planning and motivation. “What this means is that establishing offshore marine protected areas [...]
