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Today, many of the world’s river and lake basins are threatened by environmental problems such as change in river flow, water pollution, reduced water availability, salt water intrusion, or loss of plant and animal species. International river basin organizations (RBOs) governing such rivers are increasingly in need to address such challenges. At the same time many of them receive technical and financial support from international donor organizations. The paper therefore addresses the question of how international donor institutions support adaptation capacities of RBOs. The aim is to identify conditions under which donor support to RBOs can support adaptation to environmental changes and improve the resilience of international water basins. It does so by focusing on two cases in Southern Africa, including the Orange-Senqu Basin and the Orange-Senqu River Commission as well as the Cubango-Okavango Basin and the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission. The findings of the paper illustrate an ambivalent role of international donors with regard to river basin adaptation. While they do provide important means for adaptation in form of knowledge, financial and technical resources, they can, at the same time, threaten the long-term sustainability of adaptation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The world is confronting a range of ‘wicked problems’ that defy simple, linear solutions. Increasingly, the range of challenges including poverty, climate change and environmental degradation require solutions that cannot be drawn from a single knowledge base. Although excellent environmental legislation exists in South Africa (including that relating to climate change), it alone is not sufficient to solve the challenges the country faces. Rather, science that builds knowledge through engagement with a variety of actors, their views, expertise and perspectives, including mutual and transgressive learning, is required. This paper presents three South African case studies that reflect on the value of adopting transdisciplinary (TD) and co-production of knowledge (CPK) approaches to environmental problem-solving. Although not without their challenges, TD and CPK are inclusive approaches which usually enable a wider framing of environmental challenges and their ownership by various publics, and pave the way for effective implementation of solutions and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses the case of the proposed Pondoland National Park in South Africa, which is in the center of policy debates about biodiversity conservation, development, and resource rights in the Wild Coast area of South Africa. It explores whether the making of the case for the conservation of the Wild Coast, which relies on global environmental discourses, has ideologically and practically clarified local poor people's resource rights. It does this by tracing the genealogy of the Pondoland National Park discourse, which originates from scientific research and individual and group lobbying, to help explain the disjuncture between post-apartheid environmental policy discourses and what takes place in practice. The paper concludes that the reliance on global environmental discourses in research done in support for the Pondoland National Park complicates the role of the nation-state in terms of environmental governance, and that this can negatively affect the poor and powerless residents of the area in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing funding directed towards climate change adaptation (CCA) in developing countries, there is a growing need to understand how this support is landing on the ground and impacting on the targeted vulnerable communities. Due to failure of top-down approaches, international organisations such as the adaptation fund are now demanding direct involvement of local actors when funding adaptation actions. Direct access mechanisms have been developed to facilitate channelling fund from the international to local levels. At this level, civil society, public and private organisations have a key role to play to assist adaptation among vulnerable groups. But are local organisations ready to play that role in developing countries? In this paper, we develop and apply a framework to measure adaptive capacity among local organisations. Through extensive fieldwork in South Africa, we assessed the capacity of local organisations to develop and implement CCA projects, and thus access international funds for adaptation. Results highlight key determinants of adaptive capacity and identify areas to prioritise for capacity-building interventions. Key findings include strengthening local organisations' effectiveness (e.g. resources, project management capacity) and flexibility; raising awareness about adaptation and its links with socio-economic development; and promoting partnerships and knowledge networks as pathways to build adaptive capacity among local organisations in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last Chance Tourism (LCT) is defined by tourists' urgent visits to landscapes and seascapes, natural environments and places of social and cultural importance/heritage before they disappear. The obliteration of these environments is attributed to the rapid and destructive effects of global environmental change and globalization. These infl uences are leading to the demise of natural systems and biodiversity, including in polar regions and coral reef systems. Furthermore, cultures and traditions are also being lost. Scholarly investigations to date have reflected on the contention between the experiential gain in visiting destinations before they disappear on the one hand, and the losses to, and demise of, those very destinations through such visits. Despite aboveglobal- average rise in temperature, increasingly frequent droughts and flooding, as well as rapid globalization, the South African experience on LCT destinations remains under-investigated. This paper uses secondary sources to explore current and future destinations where cultural groups are threatened, fauna and fl ora are on the brink of extinction, and landscapes are changing for the worse. Future research opportunities are identifi ed and conceptual concerns are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use/cover change (LULCC) is an integral part of global environmental change and is influenced by both natural and socioeconomic factors. This study aims to comprehensively analyze land use and land cover (LULC) in Kwazulu-Natal and Mpumalanga provinces in eastern South Africa from 1995 to 2020 and to identify the driving force behind LULCC. Utilizing Landsat series satellite imagery as a data source and based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform and eCognition software 9.0, two different classification methods, pixel-based classification and object-oriented classification, were adopted to gather LULC data every five years. The spatiotemporal characteristics of the data were then analyzed. Using an optimal parameter-based geodetector (OPGD), this study explored the driving factors of LULCC in this region. The results show the following: (1) Of the two classification methods examined, the object-oriented classification had higher accuracy, with an overall accuracy of 80–90%. The pixel-based classification had lower accuracy, with an overall accuracy of 62.33–72.14%. (2) From 1995 to 2020, the area of farmland in the study area showed a fluctuating increase, while the areas of forest and grassland declined annually. The area of constructed land increased annually, whereas the areas of water and unused land fluctuated over time. (3) Socioeconomic factors generally had greater explanatory power than natural factors, with population growth and economic development being the main drivers of LULCC in the region. This study provides a reliable scientific basis for the formulation of sustainable land resource development strategies in the area, as well as for the management and implementation of urban and rural planning, ecological protection, and environmental governance by relevant departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing appreciation that protected areas, like all social-ecological systems (SES), are inherently complex and face an unpredictable future under the influence of global environmental change. Adaptive management is the accepted approach for managing complex SES to ensure their resilience, but unless it is supported by a governance system that is itself adaptive it has little chance of success. Scholars have identified certain principles conducive to adaptive governance. Environmental legislation, an important component of the governance system, is often misaligned with these principles. In this paper we assess adaptive governance principles with regard to legislation governing South Africa’s national parks. This assessment indicates that, to enable adaptive governance and adaptive management, legislation should (1) be co-produced by policy-makers, policy implementers and users of protected area ecosystem services; (2) commit and empower management agencies to apply the principles of adaptive governance and adaptive management, particularly in the collaborative development of management plans; (3) commit agencies to review management plans and allow flexibility to adapt plans; (4) ensure that the temporal and spatial scales of the governance system match those of the SES being managed; (5) anticipate change and avoid assumptions of system stability and predictability; and (6) provide for flexible financing mechanisms, so that funds can be prioritised and timed to meet the unpredictable demands of complex systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arid and semiarid landscapes appear to preserve more evidence of former environmental conditions, although high contemporary erosion rates and the paucity of long terrestrial-sedimentary sequences hinder their complete elucidation. This paper focuses on the late Quaternary environmental change in the Namibia in southern Africa. The Namibia is located at the interface of tropical, subtropical and temperate atmospheric and oceanic systems. Despite the fact that southern Africa was not subject to Quaternary glaciation per se, the influence of variations in amount and seasonality of rainfall has been very marked indeed. The relationship between geomorphology and climate in Namibia reveals the degree and extent to which its landscapes are determined by changing environmental conditions, especially during the Late Quaternary. Case studies of late Quaternary environmental changes in the northern, western and central Namibia are presented. In the western Namibia, over the last 140 ka during the Late Pleistocene, lower leaf-wax δD and higher δ13C (more C4 grasses) were recorded in a marine sediment core at 23°S off the coast of Namibia, which indicates wetter Southern Hemisphere (SH) summer conditions and increased seasonality, during SH insolation maxima relative to minima and during the last glacial period relative to the Holocene and the last interglacial period. In the central part of the Namibia, the application of OSL dating to both aeolian and fluvial sediments from the Namib Desert is contributing to the understanding of palaeohydrological, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic change in the region. OSL chronologies from two complex linear dune features close to Gobabeb suggest the current dunes are young (Holocene age), with important messages about the dynamics of the system and migration rates, whilst OSL ages from dunes in the southern part of the Sand Sea suggests older material of up to 24 ka at 5 m depth. The Holocene environmental change in northern Namibia can be deduced from evidences from soils and sediments in the Otjiwarongo thornbush savanna. In this region degradation and desertification (man-made aridification) of drylands are developed during the Holocene. Vertisol– Kastanozem–Calcisol soil associations occur widely (as patches of several hundred hectares in extent). They have formed in fine-grained Mid-Holocene sediments which accumulated on both sides of the subcontinental watershed. Kastanozem formation cannot be explained by the environments that exist at present. The humification suggests open savanna environments in the past and does not accord with the shrublands and thornbush savanna at present. Pedological and geomorphic investigations distinguish separate degradational stages in space and time caused by different periods of human impact. Landscape degradation seems to have started in pre-colonial times (Bantu immigration?) most likely as a consequence of cattle farming, and was increased by farming since the end of the 19th century by European settlers. Degradation of vegetation and soils, and river channel formation, seem to be the main causes of farmland aridification. These examples from different regions of the Namibia document an increasing intensity of human impact on landscapes to the extent that people now play the dominant geomorphological role, especially in semiarid and coastal areas. The conclusion offers pointers as to how geomorphological evidence of Quaternary change can be used to assist in the better management of contemporary and future environmental conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]