Pippin M. L. Anderson

Insights and Opportunities Offered by a Rapid Ecosystem Service Assessment in Promoting a Conservation Agenda in an Urban Biodiversity Hotspot

Regional and global scale ecosystem service assessments have demonstrated the socioeconomic value of protecting biodiversity and have been integrated into associated policy. Local government decision makers are still unsure of the applicability, return on investment, and usefulness of these assessments in aiding their decision making. Cape Town, a developing city in a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot, has numerous competing land uses. City managers, with a tightly constrained budget, requested an exploratory study on the links between ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation within this municipal area. We set out to develop and test a simple and rapid ecosystem service assessment method aimed at determining the contribution natural vegetation remnants make to ecosystem service provision. We took selected services, identified in conjunction with city managers, and assessed these in two ways. First we used an area weighted approach to attribute services to vegetation types and assessed how these had changed through time and into the future given development needs. Second, we did a regulatory and cultural service remnant distance analysis to better understand proximity effects and linkages. Provisioning services were found to have been most severely affected through vegetation transformation. Regulatory services have been similarly affected, and these losses are more significant because regulatory services can only function in situ and cannot be outsourced in the way provisioning services can. The most significant losses were in coastal zone protection and flood mitigation services, both of which will be placed under even greater pressure given the predicted changes in climatic regimes. The role of remnant vegetation in regulating and cultural services was shown to be a significant additional consideration in making the case for conservation in the city. Our rapid assessment approach does not allow for nuanced and individual understanding of the trade-offs presented by individual remnant patches, but is particularly strong in quickly identifying issues, key focus areas, and opportunities provided by this research direction, and thereby serving to facilitate and drive constructive engagement between ecosystem service experts and city planners.

An Ecological View of the History of the City of Cape Town

Rapid global urbanization and the knowledge that ecological systems underpin the future sustainability and resilience of our cities, make an understanding of urban ecology critical. The way humans engage with ecological processes within cities is highly complex, and both from a social and ecological perspective these engagements cannot be interpreted meaningfully on the basis of a single timeframe. Historical analyses offer useful insights into the nature of social-ecological interactions under diverse conditions, enabling improved decision-making into the future. We present an historical review of the evolving relationship between the urban settlement of Cape Town and the ecological processes inherent to its natural surroundings. Since its establishment, the people of Cape Town have been acutely aware of, and exploited, the natural resources presented by Table Mountain and its surrounding wilderness area. An examination of this pattern of engagement, explored through an ecological process lens, in particular drawing on the terminology provided by the ecosystem services framework, reflects a journey of the changing needs and demands of a growing urban settlement. Ecological processes, and their ensuing flow of ecosystem services, have been exploited, overexploited, interrupted, reestablished, conserved, and variably valued through time. Processes of significance, for example water provision, soil erosion, the provision of wood and natural materials, and the role of fire, are presented. This historical analysis documents the progression from a wilderness to a tamed and largely benign urban environment. Evident is the variable valuing of ecosystem service attributes through time and by different people, at the same time, dependent on their immediate needs.

Local Assessment of Cape Town: Navigating the Management Complexities of Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Ecosystem Services in the Cape Floristic Region

The city of Cape Town, South Africa’s most southwestern city, sits on a peninsula in the heart of the geographically restricted Cape Floristic Region, which is home to exceptional biodiversity. Within the city boundary are some 3,350 plant species, 190 of which are endemic to the city itself. Like all South African cities, Cape Town continues to grapple with development discrepancies that persist from unjust apartheid governance in the past and present-day challenges of urban sprawl. The population of the city is 3.7 million. Extreme poverty, with nearly 17 % unemployment, and extensive informal settlements characterize much of the City and stand in stark contrast to wealthy suburbs with freestanding homes. For the populace of Cape Town, the natural environment presents both considerable ecosystem service advantage with, for example, a flourishing tourism industry and provisioning opportunities for the urban poor, but also a significant hazard with, for example, exposure to flooding in winter from a high water table. The value of ecosystem services is an emerging concept in the environmental management arena, and environmental and conservation issues are still seen as separate to other areas of city development, and tend to receive a lower prioritization. South Africa has good environmental legislation, but this is sometimes weakly enforced due to conflicting demands, fiscal constraints, and/or lack of implementation mechanisms. Climate change predictions for the region suggest likely biodiversity impacts, but how these will play out remain unknown. An emerging interest in the role of ecosystem services in broader City management and novel conservation approaches involving civic interests all show considerable promise for the conservation of urban biodiversity in the city of Cape Town.

Urban Ecological and Social-Ecological Research in the City of Cape Town : Insights Emerging from an Urban Ecology CityLab

Urban Ecological and Social-Ecological Research in the City of Cape Town : Insights Emerging from an Urban Ecology CityLab

Regional Assessment of Africa

Although there is large spatial variation in rates of change across the 55 nations of Africa, the combined impact of high natural population growth and rural-to-urban migration means that Africa is urbanizing faster than any other continent. At a growth rate of nearly 3.4 % per annum, Africa’s urban population is the fastest growing in the world. Currently nearly 40 % of Africa’s inhabitants live in cities (UN Habitat 2010), which is expected to more than double from 395 million people to 1 billion in 2040. In some cases, it is projected that city populations will swell by up to 85 % in the next 15 years. The Nigerian city of Lagos, home to 8 million in 2000, is anticipated to exceed 16 million by 2015. Several other cities such as Abuja, Abidjan, Addis Ababa, Kano, Kinshasa, Luanda, Nairobi and, Ouagadougou are all expected to grow by more than one million by the end of this decade.