Jeremy Gilmore – FoTP Youth Representative
Lower Tokai Park is a nature reserve currently governed by South African National Parks (SANParks). It makes up approximately 195 hectares (ha) and is situated in Tokai, Western Cape, South Africa.
During the Apartheid era, Tokai Park became a frequently used whites-only recreational area and it is now commonly used for activities such as: horse-riding, cycling, walking and picnics.
For over a century most of Tokai Park was covered in a commercial Monterey Pine (Pinus radiata) plantation and has seen through three harvest cycles.
On Monday 29 August 2016, Tokai residents received a letter from SANParks warning that felling in the Lower Tokai Park plantation was to begin once more on Tuesday 30 August.
Many were upset.
One such resident, Andrea Pearson, said: “I come here with my dogs every day. During the school holiday I also take the kids out to come play here. This is a very nice place and cutting down the pines is a mistake. The fynbos is dangerous. We don’t want the fynbos. I don’t think I will come here ever again because I’m scared, scared for my safety.”
Others expressed satisfaction at the removal of the pines: “This is the beginning of a process to complete the cycle. Fynbos is a historic marker. This will preserve the history and it is extremely important,” said Dr Berta van Rooyen, an historian.
Tokai Park is ecologically viable, meaning it is large enough to maintain minimal, viable populations of a number of different plant species. It is known that the Park’s main vegetation type is Cape Flats Sand Fynbos (CFSF). CFSF is now nationally listed as Critically Endangered (CR).
This is especially significant when CFSF is being lost to rapidly expanding urbanisation taking place at an astonishing rate. We have only 14% remaining and 5% still in relatively good condition. This is important because CFSF is a Cape Town endemic vegetation type and a mere 1% is currently being conserved.
In addition to this, this vegetation type is home to at least 108 IUCN Red List Species (International Union for Conservation of Nature). From this alone we can gather that pine plantations should not be planted in the Park due to the enormous role CFSF plays in sustaining a large portion of the biodiversity in Cape Town.
Dr Tony Rebelo of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) says: “There are currently 147 Cape Flats Sand Fynbos plant species threatened with extinction – this is an increase of 36 species in the last 10 years. Several plant species are already extinct. There are very few megadiverse vegetation types on earth occurring only within city borders.”
Since the removal of pines in some parts of Tokai Park, more than 400 native plant species have returned, bringing back other wildlife such as porcupine, caracal and Cape fox with them.
With such a small percentage left of what once existed of CFSF, it is quite clear that this vegetation type needs a lot more protection than it is currently being offered.
This makes Lower Tokai Park no place for a pine plantation. We must use this relatively small, yet extremely diverse piece of land to its full potential and conserve its flora (and, inevitably, fauna too), as best as possible.
In a November 2019 article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, William Bond, Nicola Stevens, Guy Midgley and Caroline Lehmann assert:
Extensive tree planting is widely promoted for reducing atmospheric CO2. In Africa, 1 million km2, mostly of grassy biomes, have been targeted for ‘restoration’ by 2030. The target is based on the erroneous assumption that these biomes are deforested and degraded.
Pointing out that African grasslands are home to Pleistocene megafauna that supports a host of bird, reptile, plant and insects species not found in forest biomes, the authors argue that tree-planting programmes such as the Bonn Challenge, AFR100 and other trillion-tree afforestation initiatives funded by industrial nations and planned for Africa (extending over an area 45% that of Australia or 36% that covered by the USA) are based on erroneous assumptions and constitute a “profound misreading of Africa’s grassy biomes”.
Citing empirical studies concluding that Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) “converting African savannas to plantations is pointless as a mitigation measure”, their criticism of the professed benefits of afforestation extends to the poster child paper on afforestation, Bastin et al’s The global tree restoration potential, published to public acclaim and scientific criticism in Science in July 2019.
“An underappreciated problem is that biophysical consequences of afforestation can negate climate effects of reducing CO2,” the authors write. Alluding to the albedo effect of afforestation, they point out that land hungry, fire prone “forests absorb more incoming radiation than grasslands so that plantations may cause a net warming, rather than the intended cooling.”
Sequestration of the current growth in atmospheric CO2 by way of afforestation would require an area 53% larger than the USA or 85% that of Russia in a best-case scenario or, more realistically, a third of the world’s available land. “The limited benefits of afforestation for reducing atmospheric CO2 have not been widely appreciated,” they allege. “The global scale of tree planting promoted by AFR100 and similar programmes ignores local concerns over land tenure, competition with agriculture, and conservation, and imposes this single dominant land use for generations to come.”
Moreover, when it comes to the Bonn Challenge, industrialised nations have committed less than 0.5% of the cost of nullifying the growth rate in atmospheric CO2, implying either an attempt to short change African nations or evidence that “they do not see afforestation as a serious contributor to CO2 reduction.”
They conclude, “[W]e find it difficult to understand why afforestation is so widely supported. As demonstrated by the UK, emissions reductions by reducing fossil fuel dependency are feasible without reducing economic growth and are far more effective in reducing rates of CO2 increase than afforestation. Indeed, trees-for-carbon projects can be seen as a distraction from the urgent business of reducing fossil fuel emissions. Planting 100 Mha of trees, far away in Africa, might reduce the urgency of emissions reductions in industrial countries that are the major sources of greenhouse gases. We suggest that serious and urgent consideration needs to be given to the wisdom of continuing continental scale afforestation in Africa and elsewhere.”
Jeremy, in measuring the benefits of Fynbos restoration against those of the conservation of a small stand of pines at Tokai Park, finds himself in respectable company.
