World wetlands guardian calls for urgent report on SA's ‘forgotten' reserve

Daily Maverick

02-07-2025

The custodians of the world's most valuable wetland areas have sent another reminder to South Africa to submit a long-overdue report about the long-standing threats facing the Ndumo Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal.
In a report published ahead of the 15th meeting of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in Zimbabwe next month, the treaty secretariat has once again requested a detailed report on the future of the 10,000-hectare Ndumo reserve, which lies on the border between northern KZN and Mozambique.
Noting that a status report on Ndumo has been outstanding for more than six years, the secretariat has now urged South Africa to give 'high priority' to compiling and submitting this report.
The international convention, focused on the conservation and sustainable use of globally important wetlands – such as the Pantanal in South America, the Okavango Delta in Botswana or The Sudd in South Sudan – is named after an Iranian city where the global wetlands convention was signed in 1971.
Ndumo is one of 31 sites in South Africa recognised for their global importance in wetland conservation, but it was occupied by subsistence farmers just before the 2009 election season, when they were promised initial access to a small 20ha patch of the reserve to plant vegetables in some of the wettest and most fertile soils of the reserve.
Since then, well more than 600ha of Ndumo has been cultivated or transformed by human activity, an area at least 30 times larger than the original area promised to communities.
Ndumo, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, was proclaimed in 1924 mainly to provide sanctuary for the rapidly vanishing hippos of the Maputaland region, which once ranked as the third-largest hippo population in South Africa.
Recent academic studies suggest that hippo and crocodile numbers in Ndumo have declined dramatically, coupled with a major escalation in wildlife poaching, the felling of forest vegetation for firewood and gillnetting of fish from the Phongola River.
The Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife agency reported seeing more than 500 cattle in the eastern part of the reserve during a recent helicopter game census, along with more than 150 boats that are used to access farming fields or to place illegal gillnets.
In terms of article 3.2 of the convention member nations are required to report any threats to Ramsar sites 'at the earliest possible time'.
It remains unclear what official notification procedures South Africa has followed since the first threats emerged about 17 years ago, but according to briefing documents on the Ramsar website, the secretariat opened a file on Ndumo in June 2019 following a third-party report that the reserve was under threat from 'extensive farming activities coupled with significant management issues'.
Earlier this year, Daily Maverick sent queries about this issue to the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, which acts as the country's Ramsar administrative authority.
In response to questions, the department said on 6 March that no article 3.2 reports on Ndumo had been submitted to Ramsar, although the department was 'aware of the challenges' facing the reserve.
It added that the department was awaiting the results of a water quality assessment report on Ndumo, but gave no clear indication of the reasons for the long delay in providing information to Ramsar.
The department has also not responded to further questions from Daily Maverick sent on 23 June, requesting reasons for the six-year delay in providing information to Ramsar.
Dr Simon Pooley, a conservation researcher at Birkbeck, University of London who has been trying to call attention to the threats facing Ndumo for several years, has expressed dismay about the apparent inaction and 'obfuscation' by the department.
He noted that Ndumo's crocodile population had suffered a 'catastrophic collapse', declining from about 1,000 in the 1990s to about 300 in 2023.
The number of hippo in Ndumo had also dropped from 300 to just 80 over a similar period.
Though there are now just more than 2,500 Ramsar sites globally, covering more than 2.5 million km², convention signatories remain concerned about the rapid loss of wetland areas across the world.
At the convention's 15th meeting in Zimbabwe from 23 to 31 July, treaty members will be asked to endorse the Victoria Falls Declaration on global wetland protection.
A draft version of the declaration on the Ramsar website calls on government ministers and delegation heads at the Victoria Falls meeting to 'recognise the urgent need for strong political will and concrete action to advance the conservation, restoration, management and wise and sustainable use of all types of wetlands'. DM