SLIDE 20 20
- 2. SPATIAL CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES (1 OF 10)
BIOPHYSICAL
Biophysical Key Challenges and Opportunities Short Term Issues (≤ 5 years) Capacity is an issue throughout all the participating municipalities. There is a lack in human resources for environmental management and in turn, the municipality cannot address environmental issues faced by the municipality. Medium Term Issues (> 5 years and ≤ 15 years) Water Management and water catchment management is a prevalent challenge, which refers to wetland degradation, surface and ground water contamination. This is mostly resultant from development in close vicinity to wetlands and water resources, over cultivation, communal grazing and poor agricultural practices. Linked to the challenges around water management, is water provision. The country as a whole is facing drought conditions and water is scarce in the region. This results in numerous knock-on effects which will be most prominent in agriculture. Soil erosion and degradation is also particularly problematic, arising from agricultural activities, no crop rotations, poor agricultural practices and communal grazing, as well as
- ver utilization of soils.
While urbanisation and urban sprawl is a recurring major challenge for the study area, as extracted from the relevant IDPs, it must be noted that the study area is predominantly
- rural. Of greater relevance then, is rural sprawl or concentration in environmentally
sensitive areas. Where reference is made to urban sprawl, this is with regards to the few towns in Vryheid, and Ulundi, for example. The challenge here being that the increase in urbanisation is in many cases inadequately planned for, which in turn has a detrimental impact on the environment as there is a lack of land allocation, resulting in informal settlements near watercourses and wetlands.
