Conservation Archives - Garden Route Biosphere Reserve

The Garden Route Biosphere Reserve (GRBR) has initiated a regional project focused on Strategic Water Source Areas (SWSAs) in the biosphere reserve domain.

Water resource management within the Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma Strategic Water Source Areas is complex and requires a landscape level approach involving the collaboration of a great diversity of stakeholders from multiple sectors (e.g., agriculture, farming, government sector, non-governmental organisations), and from multiple levels (e.g., local, district, provincial, national).

With the support of the World Wide Fund for Nature South Africa the GRBR is initiating the Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma Water Source Partnership project. The project aims to capacitate the GRBR to manage and coordinate partnership activities at a landscape scale, to ensure better water security of the Outeniqua and Tsitsikamma Strategic Water Source Areas, through the establishment of a Strategic Water Source Areas network and working group, which can facilitate social learning and adaptive management of water resources in the region.

Dr. Bianca Currie introduces the project, its purpose and status in the short video update below.

Invitation to address water quality issues in the Garden Route Biosphere Reserve

Date: Tuesday 24th March 2020
Venue: Knysna Log-Inn Hotel, 16 Gray St, Knysna Central, South Africa
Link to venue: https://goo.gl/maps/gs7x3REvce29wWdr5

Workshop Overview
The Garden Route Biosphere Reserve (GRBR) is undergoing a collaborative strategy development process, and as part of this process interested individuals and organisation are cordially invited to attend the first of two workshops to identify and contribute to tackling water quality issues within the Garden Route Biosphere Reserve. We hope that our approach will lead to a strong sense of action required at the landscape level, while learning from and working with specific project level work already underway. We are looking for tangible actions that can be taken to conserve our valuable water resources.

The purpose of the first workshop is to:
1. Identify and discuss major threats to water quality in the GRBR domain,
2. Identify existing water quality initiatives, where we invite participants with existing initiatives to give a short (5 minutes) introduction.
3. Ask how we as a community can come together to tackle some of the identified threats and to support existing successful initiatives.

The key outcomes of both workshops are to establish a working group to develop a programme to tackle Water Pollution, which the GRBR will ratify into a proposal document by June 2020. The proposal will be used to leverage the GRBR as an overarching mechanism to raise funds for coordinated actions by stakeholders in the landscape which are aligned with the vision and mission of the GRBR.

Participants are encouraged to commit to and attend both workshops to ensure continuity and consistency in the development of ideas, knowledge and outcomes. The workshops will be held on Tuesday 24th of March in Knysna and Friday 8th of May in George.

Registration for the Workshops
Please express your interest in attending as soon as possible, but not later than 19th of March 2020.

RSVP email to Luzanne Visagie at admin@gardenroutebiosphere.org.za (or Luzanne.visagie@mandela.ac.za)

Contact Person: Dr Louw Claassens
Email Address: kyss.louw@gmail.com

Please let us know if you would like to occupy a 5-minute slot to introduce your initiative.

Project Team: Bianca Currie, Louw Claassens and Ntombi Vundla