The Garden Route Fires: Reflection on environmental recovery

The disastrous June 2017 Garden Route fires provided a wake-up call about the deleterious effects of climate change in South Africa, and in many ways is a watershed regarding future approaches and preparedness for these disasters, as well as for the ensuing rehabilitation and rebuilding of the damaged environment.

A seminar hosted in Knysna by the Southern Cape landowners’ Initiative (SCLI) on 23^rd and 24^th November 2017, provided a platform for reflecting on the progress made with environmental recovery, also outside the Knysna burn scar.

As in the past, this seminar was organised and facilitated by Cobus Meiring for SCLI, as a follow-up of a seminar held just before the Knysna fire. SCLI is a public platform for landowners and land managers with an interest in the eradication and control of invasive alien plants (IAPs), and the promotion of water evaporation prevention, in the Garden Route. SCLI is supported by the Table Mountain Fund, an associated trust of WWF SA.

The well-attended and highly successful seminar was co-hosted by the Garden Route Rebuild Initiative (GRRI) under the auspices of the Cape Provincial Government, Eden District Municipality (DM), Knysna Municipality, The Nelson Mandela University’s Sustainable Research Unit (NMU SRU), Southern Cape FPA, Working on Fire (WoF), and DAFF.

Key stakeholders of the following environmental sectors in the Garden Route were involved in the seminar:

All forestry companies
Relevant government departments
Municipal authorities
Media and government communication entities
Private / public conservation bodies
Academic and research entities
Private and public landowners and land managers

The aim of the seminar was to wrap up the initiatives of the Post-fire Environmental Challenges and Responses Working Group, and to consider the challenge of controlling the explosion of IAPs in 2018.

Mayor of the Eden DM, Councillor Memory Booysen, provided the welcoming address, commenting that he commutes between Knysna and George daily and since the fire has noticed the lack of fire breaks along the way.

The keynote address was delivered by the Premier of the Western Cape, Ms Helen Zille. She shared her impressions about the achievements so far of not only the environmental, but also the humanitarian, reconstruction, and skills work streams, which she termed as providing useful models for replication in other situations.

Focusing on the achievements of the environmental work stream regarding initial stabilisation of erodible steep slopes she addressed some of the challenges, inter alia fire risk reduction, wildland/urban interfaces, fire breaks, and IAP control, and confirmed support to the GRRI by the Province.

Professor Christo Fabricius of the NMU SRU set the scene for the day by reflecting on transformative change / global change and adaptation, by re-thinking the “rebuild Knysna” concept. He stated that the fire disaster was a blessing in disguise, for it provided the opportunity of doing something new instead of yearning to look back to what was there before the fire.

He defined sustainability as a “caring” for yourself in the first place, but then also the people around (the community), and finally, the environment. From the disaster as the crucial starting point for transformative change one should move towards planning, taking into account social ecology (dealing with two very different communities, the rich and the poor), and making a declaration about the Knysna that we want in future.

Japie Buckle from the Department of Environment Affairs’ Natural Resource Management Section (DEA NRM) wrapped up the GRRI achievements on the environment and addressed the attendees on IAP management and planning for the future.

He started off by presenting an overview on organisational arrangements and funding streams for the environmental work stream.

The environmental work stream had been subdivided into four work groups, being fuel management, wildland/urban interface, legal/landowners and ecological integrity.

The eight funding streams comprised the following:

Eden DM (funds spent)
SANParks (funds spent)
GRRI Business Funds (approved)
Natural Disaster Management funding (pending)
WWF herbicide assistance (approved)
DEA funding of Wood at Heart products
DEA Land use Incentive Fund (pending – herbicide assistance for IAPcontrol )
Provincial Drought Fund (pending).

He continued to present on the implementation achievements so far. 8 km of wood fibre rolls (or sausages) and 11 000 m² wood blankets provided by WoodatHeart have been installed on post fire erosion mitigation projects, and hydro-seeding with Teff grass (Eragrostis tef) as an interim stabiliser to be replaced by indigenous plant growth during the course of time, had been executed.

There are some challenges for future rehabilitation of indigenous vegetation for which all answers are not yet available, but which will be tackled as they present themselves. One is the lack of sand fynbos areas from which to harvest seed for sowing in the burn patches where indigenous seed banks have been destroyed. Another is the problem of tackling the profuse regeneration of IAPs, regarding which a limited time window is available for treatment with herbicides.

Pam Booth presented the Knysna Municipality’s environmental transformative approach to changing the way things have been done in the past and adapting to the new set of circumstances.

She distinguished between so-called Quick Thrills (QT) and Legacy Projects (LP), the former being characterised by quick turnaround time solutions, like pilot projects, projects with small to medium cost implications, and innovative projects; the latter by a longer turnaround time.

Under the QT and LP she listed various actions/ techniques, for instance drought and fire resistant landscaping, floating wetlands, and awareness roadshows, as QTs, and sustainable urban drainage systems, and a modular waste to energy pilot, as LPs.

Tiaan Pool, programme coordinator for forestry and veldfires at NMU’s School for Natural Resource Management, presented some aspects from the recent NMU Symposium on the Knysna fires, inter alia the need to better understand fire events nationally and internationally in order to understand and manage risk, and the matter of wildfires in the urban/rural interface.

Canada: Fort McMurray May 2016: 88 000 people evacuated, 2400 buildings destroyed, 890 000 ha burn scar.
Portugal June 2017: 64 mortalities, 44 000 ha burn scar
Australia Sept. 2017: 200 houses destroyed
Portugal and Spain October 2017: more than 7900 fires, 49 mortalities
USA: California October 2017: 6267 fires, 41 mortalities, 5700 structures destroyed
South Africa: Gauteng 2014: 2090 mortalities as a result of fire accidents.

There is a relationship between the scale of a fire and the scale of damage.

Diana Turner and the Outramps Crew gave a post burn review from a botanical perspective, in which it was found that indigenous vegetation in the dunes came back very slowly, and that there was an explosion of IAPs.

Burn patterns and re-growth potential in the fynbos were addressed in a presentation by NMU’s Dr. Tineke Kraaij. She found that two-thirds of the burnt area was in altered ecosystems and one third in natural vegetation which was largely uninvaded. Heavily degraded areas occurred in 10% of the area burnt. From weather data consulted, the fire was extreme in ecological terms, with extreme intensity, which resulted in humus layers in places to have been totally consumed.

Her findings about recovery potential are that natural forest damaged by ground fires will recover with time, dune milkwood forest will recover very slowly, but that the burning of dune thicket / fynbos mosaic will present an opportunity for fynbos to recover, as the absence of fire for a very long period has favoured the invasion of woody indigenous species. Drought will negatively affect regrowth, and dune erosion is to be expected.

Christiaan Smit, estate manager of MTO’s Kruisfontein Plantation which had been severely hit by the June 2017 fire, presented on IAP enumerations as a management tool, to determine where and how to direct efforts at weed control within manpower and budget constraints. His weed control programmes provided an interesting and effective approach to determine priorities and achievable targets.

The attendees took note of PG Bison’s impressive and unique efforts to store a very large percentage of the burnt timber salvaged from about 4500 ha burnt plantations, in a wet deck system. Logs were stacked in a line of 2,8 km and are irrigated at a rate of 50 mm of rain per day from boreholes into an underground aquifer in the Ruigtevlei Plantation of PG Bison’s South Cape Forests. Heine Muller, estate manager, was the presenter. Some questions arose as to the amount of water recycled by infiltration to the aquifer, which is situated in old sand dune formations, taking into account evaporation losses and the indefinite storage period.

Some graphic images of the wildfire tragedy on the severely rooikrans-infested private farms in the Stilbaai area in February 2017 were displayed by Wim Filmalter of Agriculture, Riversdal. He deplored the fact that the Knysna fires diverted attention from the farmers’ plight, so that financial resources were concentrated on Knysna, causing the Stilbaai farmers to struggle to rebuild their farming enterprises, with pasture, thatching reed, houses and fences destroyed. In the meantime the rooikrans seedlings have germinated and are denser than ever, with manual or tractor-applied herbicide control unfeasible. The only feasible method would be aerial spraying.

Willie Aurette from Dow AgroSciences informed the audience about the successes obtained by aerial spraying of heavy infestations of Port Jackson wattle on a large farm along the Stilbaai coast, which resulted in the effective killing off of the wattle and achieving an excellent return of the fynbos species, e.g. Proteaceae. These successes were obtained by spraying with the chemical Confront. However, owing to the terrain conditions, aerial spraying is not practical in the Knysna area.

Grant Trebble and Louwtjie Theron representing Wood at Heart, gave a presentation that attracted much interest for their poplar wood fibre products, being wood wool packed into sausages or mats of biodegradable plastic netting to be fixed onto steep slopes to counteract erosion. Biomass waste, derived from their harvesting operations of poplar timber on Free State farms, as well as sawmill waste, is processed into these products. Their factory in Pretoria is able to produce up to 2½ tons of wood wool per hour. Production is determined by demand. This firm will also provide the equipment for hydro-seeding.

The availability of these products have made a dramatic difference in stabilising the extremely vulnerable denuded slopes around Knysna, as was proved with the recent downpours of up to 70 mm of rain in two days.

Strategic prioritisation of IAP control in the Garden Route National Park buffer areas is essential, according to Maretha Alant, who presented for SANParks. A recent controlled burn in the vicinity of Buffels Bay, although successful, demonstrated that such burns are associated by high risk, high costs and logistic challenges, which inhibit the general application of such burns.

Keith Spencer, Errol Finkelstein, Dr. Dave Edge and Susan Campbell gave interesting perspectives on respectively – the recovery of dune vegetation in CapeNature’s Goukamma Nature Reserve (NR), the management of the Garden Route Biosphere Reserve, the possible extinction of the Brenton blue butterfly in its tiny habitat of a few hectares in extent, and the challenges of a landowner who is affected by the fire.

In the Goukamma NR, there is relatively little regeneration of IAPs due to stringent programmes of control of these over a number of years. These are now bearing fruit. Although host plants are recovering, no Brenton blue butterflies or the ants which live in symbiosis with its larvae had been seen by the 23^rd November. However, amazingly, contrary to general expectation, Dave, on the field excursion the next day, found some clear evidence of the butterfly recovering from the fire.

The seminar was concluded by an open discussion facilitated by Christo Fabricius and Japie Buckle.

Christo gave recognition to SCLI’s approach of taking the initiative on behalf of civil society to organise and facilitate cooperative action, instead of waiting for spheres of government to do so. It is a bottom-up mobilization instead of the less effective top- down approach.