The Southern Cape Landowners Initiative (SCLI) and Table Mountain Fund will assist Garden Route landowners in the coming months in their efforts to clear ecological infrastructure, such as rivers, wetlands and seep lines, of invasive alien plants.

The project, called the SCLI Cape Floristic Corridor Revival and Training Programme, is a regional drive to improve efforts to enhance the survival of the Southern Cape floristic footprint.

The project entails the establishment of a network of north–south conservation corridors along selected river systems – the Groot Brak, Touw, Kaaimans, Knysna and Goukamma rivers in the Southern Cape – and is aimed at determining factors that inhibit corridor flow through an interactive land management framework.

The selected corridors represent crucially important remaining natural land available for biodiversity connectivity and conservation in the region.

SCLI representative Cobus Meiring stated in a release on Monday that the current drought and recent wildfires have had significant economic, social and environmental impacts, which has brought renewed regional attention on ecological resistance, as well as disaster and risk response.

“In many respects, the 2017 Knysna fires served as a wake-up call to authorities in the Southern Cape and in the Garden Route that we are moving towards a planning and coordinating scenario where the region can be better prepared for what lies ahead, instead of staggering from one disaster to the next in dealing with the effects of climate change.

“Identifying invasive alien plants as the number one threat to our regional environment and natural infrastructure, and the work done by SCLI in assisting landowners and land managers in the Southern Cape to help them understand the environmental damage and downstream problems caused by invasive alien plants, directly feed into the way we manage natural infrastructure in the Southern Cape,” he explained.