by Dr Mike Burns
To reside in one of the Hangklip villages is to be immersed in an environment of outstanding natural beauty. However, the Kogelberg Biosphere represents much more than this. It accounts for the area’s societal attributes too, including human dependencies on ecosystem services, such as soils that enable productive agriculture in the Elgin-Grabouw valley, yields of potable water derived from fynbos-clad mountain catchments and spectacular aesthetic appeal. And it also accounts for a range of related economic activities undertaken within and across its borders.
It is understandable that many of us are interested in perhaps one or two fragments of the Biosphere. However, this can come at a cost, which is to have a limited perspective on the functioning and state of the Biosphere as a whole. In particular, existential threats to its sustainability may be overlooked. And this is where a conceptual social-ecological systems model of the Biosphere can be useful. It can provide a simplified representation of real-world complexity, enabling insight and understanding, especially for the purpose of managing towards sustainability. Such a modelling exercise was the theme of the Bot Soc presentation given by Dr Mike Burns on 12 April 2025.
Mike explained that, recently, a team of local scientists and professionals (ecologists, engineers, economists, social scientists, lawyers, etc.), with research and other interests in the Kogelberg, volunteered their expertise in order to construct a social-ecological systems model of the Biosphere. This was done primarily with the aim of revealing threats to its sustainability – and the opportunities to mitigate these.
The modelling approach entailed two main steps: The first, employed the diverse expertise of the modelling team to identify the key bio-physical environmental, social and economic elements that create the composition and structure of the Biosphere (e.g. geological formations and soil types, fynbos and nearshore marine ecosystems, fire regimes, human settlement patterns, economic activity, etc.). The second, involved interaction between team members, across disciplinary and professional boundaries, in order to identify the relationships that link individual system elements to one another (e.g. shale-derived soils that have a determining influence on the Biosphere’s agricultural sector; the determining influence of upwelling of the Benguela system on local kelp forest ecosystems and the relationship between these and criminal abalone poaching syndicates; etc.). The identified relationships were characterised as having either reinforcing (+) or diminishing (-) influences on the system elements that they linked. The Vensim modelling software was used to capture the information and to generate relationship patterns.
The model reveals the remarkable connectivity between the Biosphere’s environmental, social and economic attributes. It also reveals threats to its resilience through relationships that typically follow circuitous routes through the system in the form of ‘feedback loops’. These tend to go unnoticed until they quite suddenly threaten the collapse of those parts of the system that they compromise. The following six ‘pressure points’, considered most serious in terms of the threats they pose to the sustainability of the Biosphere, were identified:
- Threats to the Elgin-Grabouw agricultural economy and to the Kogelberg Nature Reserve complex posed by the illegal occupation of State Forest land.
- Ecological and social pathologies associated with gang-controlled abalone poaching.
- Threats to biodiversity and critical ecosystem services, such as water supply, posed by invasive alien plant species.
- Wildfire risks affecting biodiversity, human safety and built infrastructure.
- Town planning failures.
- Infrastructure and utility failures; e.g. Eskom, water reticulation, urban drainage systems.
In the presentation, each of these sustainability ‘pressure points’ was described through reference to ‘clipped out’ sections of the model that were used to illustrate the system relationships. In some cases, feedback loops were revealed to which the ‘pressure points’ are attributed. Actions that have been initiated, subsequent to the modelling, in response to the sustainability threats arising from these ‘pressure points’ were described. These include: strategic planning aimed at improving the effectiveness of different groups involved across the Biosphere in the control of invasive alien vegetation; proactively addressing the dual risks to fynbos ecosystems and human safety posed by wildfires; evidence-based motivation submitted for the transfer of Highlands State Forest to the custodianship of CapeNature, with three related outcomes: (i) a link created by the State Forest land between three currently isolated portions of the Kogelberg Nature Reserve complex, (ii) a conserved, fully connected mega-ecological corridor in excess of 100 000 hectares, and (iii) greatly reduced risk of illegal occupation of this State Forest land and related impacts.
Much of the presentation addressed the ecological and social pathologies associated with gang-controlled abalone poaching. The following figure, clipped from the model informs the brief outline that follows, which addresses this particularly concerning sustainability ‘pressure point’.
Fisheries monitoring data show a dramatic decline in the wild stocks of South African abalone (Haliotis midae). The commercial fishery has not been administered very well, with quotas having been unfairly allocated and at levels that cumulatively exceed research recommendations. Currently, there are too many commercial licence-holders, with rights to harvest sub-economic quotas, which is a situation likely to encourage poaching. By far the biggest threat to wild abalone stocks is the impact of gang-controlled syndicated poaching, which removes an estimated 3,000 tonnes of abalone per year (fifty times the commercially permissible catch). Nowhere is the impact of poaching more clearly illustrated than within the Betty’s Bay Marine Protected Area, where the most recent scientific survey reveals the surviving stock of wild abalone at a level less than 1% of that recorded in the 1990s (i.e. before the rampant poaching era). Even though some individual abalone will escape being poached, little replenishment of natural stocks can be expected since successful reproduction of the species requires tightly packed associations of male and female adults.
China is the main market for dried poached abalone, which is valued at around US$217 million per year. Very little of this value returns to South Africa, but accrues instead to agents based in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique, which are the main centres of export. The irony of this is that two of these countries do not have coastlines, while the other’s coastal environment does not support South African abalone. Very few commercial transactions along the poaching value chain are cash-based, with trades in methamphetamine and cocaine being the most common exchanges. Thus, not only must the ecological and economic harms of poaching be accounted for, but also the societal damage that is wreaked through the drug trade.
There was a brief period when abalone poaching was brought under control in the 1990s. This entailed committed law-enforcement, successful prosecutions effected by the ‘Green Court’ that was established in Hermanus at the time, and excellent public incident-reporting systems, such as Seawatch. This all collapsed during the State Capture era and has never recovered to any marked extent.
Mike explained that to prevent the extinction of abalone and to halt the social pathologies attributable to poaching, a number of interventions are required: Arguably the most important, which has recently been initiated by the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve Management Company, is to apply for the export/import of dried abalone to be banned in terms of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES, Appendix II). This would not affect the export of South African farmed abalone. High levels of investment in training of law enforcement agencies is also necessary in order to effect prosecutable arrests at every level of the poaching value chain. And public reporting platforms, which have proved so successful in the past, need to be re-vitalised.
Jobs lost to the illicit poaching economy can almost certainly be replaced within either the abalone farming or ranching sectors. South African abalone farms, such as award-winning Abagold at Gansbaai, are world leaders in the field and have considerable potential for expansion. Partnering with local small-scale fishing associations, they also have the expertise to raise juvenile abalone for ‘re-seeding’ depleted wild habitats in order to create ranches that allow for sustainable harvesting over time. The latter requires attention to the preservation of genetic diversity amongst wild abalone stocks, but this does not appear to be an insurmountable challenge.
In conclusion, Mike explained that none of the above will materialise without buy-in from the lead government agency responsible for conserving and managing the commercial exploitation of South Africa’s marine resources. The Fisheries Directorate of the Department of Forestry Fisheries and the Environment did not support a CITES listing for abalone proposed in 2019. It can only be speculated on the reasons for this. However, it might have had something to do with the Directorate’s dependency on the sale of confiscated poached abalone, which covers 50% of its budget. He argued that, from any rational conservation perspective, this perverse incentive needs to be done away with.
Dr Mike Burns