Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
The ARISE Project in South Africa
JAMES BLIGNAUT, JOTTE VAN IERLAND, TRAVOR XIVURI,
RUDI VAN AARDE, AND JAMES ARONSON
Most of southern Africa's rural people depend on natural biomass as their primary fuel
source, and on ecosystems as the primary source of their livelihood (Wessels et al.
2004; Geerken and Ilaiwi 2004; Lawler et al. 2006). Given the relatively high rate of
population growth across the subcontinent, the use of biomass for fuel could deplete
natural resources and degrade biodiversity. This renewable natural capital, in the
idiom of ecological economics, can only be reversed through ecological restoration
that coincides with revised, adaptive resource management activities based on a col-
lective will and vision (Blignaut 2009). This chapter provides a critical assessment of a
project that aims to restore natural capital at a village scale in a region of dire poverty
and joblessness near Giyani, in the northeastern corner of South Africa. The project
aimed to improve living conditions and the socioeconomic well-being of local partic-
ipants, and to sustainably improve the environmental conditions that provide the ba-
sis for human life. In this case, ecological restoration actually becomes an integral
component of a broader economic development package.
We focus on the socioeconomic and immediate environmental impacts of the res-
toration project, the African Rural Initiatives for Sustainable Environments (ARISE).
We used a semistructured questionnaire to obtain information from the participants
to address the following questions: First, what can be learned from an innovative res-
toration project in a poor rural region in South Africa? Second, to what extent does
ecological restoration contribute to socioeconomic development?
We first introduce the terminology so that socioeconomics and ecology can be
combined in a single analysis. Then we describe the ecological restoration activities
that were conducted at Giyani and present the results of the questionnaire.
Restoration of Natural Capital
Restoration of natural capital (RNC) is the replenishment of natural capital stocks
to improve human well-being and ecosystemhealth (Clewell and Aronson 2006, 2007;
Aronson, Milton, and Blignaut 2007; http://www.rncalliance.org). Natural capital
consists of all stocks of natural resources as they occur in natural and managed
