Construction World November 2015

ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY

Biodiversity’s unseen value

KEY to SAVING water and CUTTING future costs The issues with South Africa’s water resources can be summarised as ‘too much’, ‘too little’ or ‘too dirty’, but simple design innovations based on sustainability principles could go a long way to addressing them. Implementation of such sustainability measures would also ease future government expenditure on infrastructure, according to leading consulting engineers and scientists SRK Consulting (SA).

She said an important aspect of sustainability in the development context was to ensure affordability of services for future genera- tions, and not just current users and taxpayers. “We will see more benefit from the sustainability approach when organisations and individuals move along the continuum – from a reactive compliance focus to the adop- tion of sustainability as an integrated strategy driven by societal values,” she said. She acknowledged that financial savings do motivate and accelerate behaviour change, especially in the areas of energy-saving, water conservation, saving materials in its products and packaging, and saving on waste-handling costs. However, she argued that organisa- tions who do not go beyond this point tend to marginalise their sustainability initiatives within specialised departments – and tack them on as ‘green housekeeping’ rather than institutionalising the approach within the company’s way of doing business to the point where value is created. By adopting sustainability as an integrated strategy – the next phase in the continuum – the whole business model gets transformed into a sustainable ‘borrow-use- return’ design. In the final stage, she said, behaviour is driven by a passionate, values- based commitment to improve the well- being of the organisation, the society and the environment. The landmark bioregional plan for Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, gazetted this year, highlights the social and economic value of biodiversity in an area of unparal- leled diversity; the area boasts five of SA’s nine biomes – the Fynbos, Albany Thicket, Forest, Nama Karoo and Grassland. The plan provides clear priorities and guidelines for all decisions that impact on biodiversity, including land-use planning, environmental assessment and authorisa- tions, and natural resource management in the municipal area. If implemented, this will help conserve ecosystems, which in turn provide frequently unseen ‘services’ to the community such as attenuating floods, providing clean water of a drinking quality standard, facilitating the pollination of important agricultural crops to support food security, and providing primary sources of food. “Ecosystems provide a range of valuable services that we take for granted because we often don’t pay in full for the services they provide,” said SRK principal environmental scientist Warrick Stewart. “When inappropriately located, devel- opment results in the loss of important ecosystems, and communities often end up paying for the long term costs of losing these important ecological assets. Good planning means retaining our priority ecological assets when we develop our new settlements and roll out associ- ated services.”

With many parts of the country in the grip of water scarcity, SA shows a steady growth in national water consumption that outstrips

and fast-growing urban settlements placed increased stress on municipal services. About 35% of current water demand in SA is from the municipal sector, compared to just 8% from industry. A recent and highly noteworthy example of good progress in this respect was Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s bioregional plan, gazetted in March this year. The first such municipal-level plan to be completed and gazetted in SA, it was produced with the assis- tance of SRK and presents the opportunity to improve the ‘spatial resilience’ of the area by ensuring the protection and management of a representative proportion of its diverse ecosystems and the services they provide. “This resilience is based on the ability of the natural environment to continue providing important services that sustain livelihoods in communities most likely to suffer the impacts of economic and environmental shocks – which in this context could include water shortages,” said SRK environmental scientist and partner Briony Liber. SRK produced the Conservation Assess- ment and Plan for the NMBM in 2010, which underpins the gazetted document, and also assisted with the gazetting process. Liber also emphasised the unseen cost of ignoring the social and economic value of ecosystems when conducting infrastructure planning – and the savings in future infra- structure by maintaining resilient ecosystems. “When planners denude the environment in pursuit of faster or cheaper roll-out of services – such as residential estates or urban infrastructure – they often inadvertently incur higher future costs,” said Liber. “For example, if an environmental asset like clean water is compromised by a plan that allows damage to a wetland, then that local authority may soon have to pay for more water treatment facilities to accomplish what the wetland used to do.”

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available supply; the situation calls for better ways of conserving water rather than just an additional supply of water, said SRK partner and principal hydrologist Peter Shepherd. “There are plenty of opportunities for all water management stakeholders – from local government to housing developers – to implement innovative designs that will save water,” said Shepherd. “Some examples are permeable roadways, water harvesting from roofs, re-use of grey water, and underground water storage – ideas that are relatively simple and inexpensive but which must be driven by sustainability principles.” The Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) estimates that water demand, driven mainly by continuing industrialisation and urbanisation, will exceed availability of economically usable fresh water resources within about a decade. Emphasising the point, the Minister of the DWS had in 2013 warned that 98% of SA’s water was considered ‘fully allocated’. Although this estimate was later revised slightly downward, the point was well made. While the National Water Resource Strategy 2013 plans to increase surface water yield by about one cubic kilometre by 2035 – mainly through increased investment in infrastructure such as dams – a sustainability approach demands more than this, said Shepherd. He said that there is frequently a one-sided focus on the construction of infrastructure to deliver water from external sources, which ignores the consideration of ways to conserve, re-use and recycle water on site. This was a particular concern in relation to the rapid influx into municipal areas, where increased population numbers

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CONSTRUCTION WORLD NOVEMBER 2015