Kruger National Park river research : a history of conservation and the 'reserve' legislation in South Africa (1988-2000)
Abstract
Like arteries in a human body, rivers not only transport water and life-giving nutrients to the landscape they feed, they are also shaped and characterised by the catchments which they drain.1 The river habitat and resultant biodiversity is a result of several physical (or abiotic) processes, of which flow is considered the most important. Flows of various quantities and quality are required to flush away sediments, transport nutrients, and kick-start life processes in the freshwater ecosystem. South Africa’s river systems are characterised by particularly variable flow regimes – a result of the country’s fluctuating climate regime, which varies considerably between wet and dry seasons. When these flows are disrupted or diminished through, for example, direct water abstraction or the construction of a weir or dam, it can have severe consequences on the ecological process which depend on these flows. A particular example of this is the Kruger National Park, South Africa’s largest national conservation area. The availability of water resources has been a prime consideration for the management of the Kruger National Park since its establishment 90 years ago in 1926. While the park is fed by five, biologically-rich, perennial systems, its location at the downstream end of the river catchments, in addition to its semi-arid rainfall and non-perennial, localised water resources, has left the park vulnerable to upstream anthropogenic impacts, and has led much of its management actions through the decades.
The National Water Act [Act No. 36 of 1998] (NWA) was one of the first new pieces of legislation to be passed after South Africa became a democracy in 1994. This Act not only recognised the right to water of all citizens, but marked the first time in South African history when the right of the environment to water (the environmental reserve – or flows of adequate quantity and quality) became enshrined in the country’s laws. The role of South Africa’s aquatic science community has been acknowledged as playing an important role in the passing of the Act. Yet there has been little by way of historiography on how aquatic science and the aquatic science community have evolved in South Africa and how this influence played itself out in South Africa’s water legislation. In particular, the influence of collaborative, multidisciplinary aquatic science programmes in driving policy changes during the 1980s and 1990s had not been subject to detailed historical investigation. Therefore, this study aimed to, by way of a historical discourse, determine a part of the history of aquatic science that led to the passing of the environmental reserve in the South African water legislation. The study specifically focused on the Kruger National Park and the KNP rivers research programme. The KNP rivers research programme, was a multidisciplinary, collaborative, aquatic research programme, which ran from 1988 to 1999. The main aim of the programme was to determine the water quantity and quality needs of the perennial rivers and their ecosystems in the Kruger National Park, as well as to develop, test and refine suitable scientific methods by which the responses of aquatic ecosystems to change could be established.
2 The Kruger National Park, in essence, became a living laboratory for newly-developed aquatic science methodologies that were being developed in South Africa, and later laid the groundwork for the environmental reserve to be included in the NWA
Collections
- Humanities [2671]