The Kruger to Canyons area, encompassing the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve (Figure 1), is an excellent example of a landscape where highly diverse land uses occur in close proximity, including state managed conserved areas, privately owned conserved areas, commercial forestry, intensive commercial agriculture such as fruit farming, and both commercial and communal rangeland.
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| Figure 1 |
The range of stakeholders engaged in such a landscape is no less diverse, including Bushbuckridge Municipality, South African National Parks, Mpumalanga Parks Board, the previously named Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF), and a range of commercial agribusiness and commercial conservation management committees.
Further, the area displays a substantive topographic and climatic diversity, making it an excellent subject for considering how climate change impacts might be successfully managed in a diverse landscape.
Previous studies indicate that climate changes in the area may already be occurring. While long-term trends in precipitation are not evident in the climatic record, temperature increases may be apparent (Figure 2). Any future climate change therefore needs to be considered against a background of possibly existing change; and within a context of existing stressors, such as increasing water demands.
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| Figure 2 |
Key areas of critical impact include water supply and quality (see note regarding existing water stresses above), commercial agriculture, forestry (including the reversion to commercial forestry of certain areas), health, commercial rangeland management, and communal agriculture and livestock. Further concerns include the increasing challenge of conservation and managing biodiversity at the landscape level - beyond the borders of national or provincial nature conservation designated areas.
This study is intended to show that working with diverse stakeholders, using tailored climatic predictions for key local sectoral concerns, comprises an essential first step in building capacity in the area to adapt to climate change. Information required for the area includes updated climate change projections for the area, with an envelope analysis; water balance models run with updated projections; climate change projections thresholded for key local industries and activities (commercial forestry, livestock, fruit); where possible, health predictive models run with updated climate change projections (malaria, cholera); and approaches to design a global change resilience index of landscape with updated climate change projections as input.
Such information has little utility alone. A clear understanding of stakeholder engagement, networks and capacity in the area, as well as a long-term commitment to communication and dialogue with stakeholders is critical to improving use of such information in building climate change adaptive capacity.
By Dr Emma Archer van Garderen, Dr Rebecca Maserumule, Claire Davis, Nikki Stevens & Lee Ann Sinden
Also visit the Climate Change Studies: K2C website
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