Conservation and Poverty Relief (WfW Programme)

Hello all!

I will write more about ecosystem services in line with poverty relief as mentioned in my previous post, and I hope this would contextualise the current state of human development in Africa within ecological objectives. After writing about the wetlands and rivers in the wetter regions of Africa, I will briefly share my thoughts about the semi-arid South Africa's Working for Water (WfW) Programme.

Working for Water (WfW) Programme, South Africa (Turpie et al. 2008)

In South Africa, the introduction of hectares of alien trees from afforestation had led to uncontrolled populations of invasive species which out-competed the indigenous tree species. These wiped out the original heterogeneity and biodiversity of the landscape and led to a presence of single-species strands of trees. Even though this invasion had presented forestry benefits (eg. timbre and carbon sequestration), these alien tree species had demonstrated a large negative effect on stream runoff. They were studied to have extremely intensive water uses and high losses through to evapotranspiration; the current invasion saw 15 invasive species utilising as much as ~7% of the runoff of the country (Wilgen et al. 1998). Their uniform presence within the landscape had reduced the catchment runoff drastically, especially in their situation close to watercourses.

In response to the issues of invasive species and water scarcity defined as 500-1000m³/person by Turpie et al. (2008), the WfW programme was initiated as a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) approach. Monetary payments were made to the poorest of the poor for their contribution to ecosystem restoration through the ambitious project to restore the presence of rivers within the landscape. They were offered two-year contracts to perform restoration work by clearing alien plants through slash-and-hook and chainsaw methods, at a minimal but nevertheless living wage (Wilgen et al. 1998).  In 2005, the WfW employed 32k people through an annual budget of US$68m gathered mostly from poverty relief funding, and evidence of success has been sighted through accounts of rivers running where water had been absent for several years (Powell, 2006).

The programme has been cited as a "win-win" solution as they achieve societal and environmental goals at the same time (McConnachie et al. 2013: 544): a) promote biodiversity and ecosystem services by restoring the pre-existing water ecosystem functions of the landscape, b) increase scarce water resources to the region at a lower cost compared to developing additional water supply schemes, and c) alleviate poverty by providing paid employment to the poorest communities in South Africa. It presents, yet again, the potential of attaching a monetary value to ecosystem services for the management of ecosystems.

I will carry out more research into this area, and elaborate more on the limitations of this WfW programme next week. See you!